Hello, my name's Jason and I'm a lecturer here at the School of IT. I'm also one of the researchers at the Deacon Cyber Research and Innovation Centre. 

I am interested in all things. Cryptography and crypto analysis is basically trying to break encryption algorithms and more broadly cybersecurity quantum computers, they process information based on quantum physics.

A quantum computer is a computer that is exponentially faster than a regular computer. So rather than representing a piece of information one at a time, a quantum computer has the capability to present many combinations at the same time. 

Quantum computers can solve a multitude of problems, including mathematical hard problems that are very difficult to be solved by regular computers that actually underpin some of our cryptographic protections.

One example would be digital signatures. Regular signature, as you would know, allows us to prove who we are to someone else. And digital signatures do just that. But online, unfortunately, with the presence of a quantum computer at a large enough scale, bad actors would be able to forge the signatures and pretend to be someone they're not.

We have lots of researchers here at Deacon looking into post quantum security and in really exciting news, the AU domain administrator has recently provided us with philanthropic funding to look into strengthening one of the core infrastructures of the internet, known as the domain name system or DNS essence.

DNS is the phone book or the yellow pages of the internet. When we type in a website on our browser, the DNS translates this human legible website name into a bunch of numbers. 

So we need a way to guarantee that the IP address or the address that we receive from the DNS server is real, and it's not something that is sent to us by an attacker.

However, if we do have quantum computers, an attacker could forge these signatures and send us a website that they control. So that you can enter your information and they can steal it. So, it's very important that this project looks into the design of digital signatures that would be able to resist such attacks.

So, this project's all about trust. How can we trust what we are receiving from someone else is legitimate and real. 

So this project looks at it from the post quantum security aspect. We want to design a solution that works right now, and also when there's a quantum computer powerful enough to break our algorithms.

What's most exciting to me is that we get to address a concern that impacts everyone around the world, not just Australians. 

Because the solution that we design is not only applicable here, it's a piece of technology that can be applied anywhere else around the world. 

It has far reaching implications, not just here, but basically for anyone around the world who uses the internet.