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With the advent of digital tools and the unprecedented uptake of this technology, a huge new area of business has opened up. This business is that of security, of data protection and of data verification, all of which are inextricably linked. The modern 'paperless' office, although it has not yet reached the high expectations of the previous decade, is still completely in debt to computers and the Internet so much so that a power cut or down servers can cause losses of millions if not billions of dollars.
Security has always been of concern to people. From ancient times, signet rings were used to seal letters and documents an early version of data verification. Codes were used to secure transmission of information; even Caesar has a code named after him, which consists simply of interchanging letters of the alphabet. This need for secure data transmission, protection and verification has not changed over the years, all that is different is that now more elaborate methods are required to ensure that 'what you see is what you want'.
Within the past twenty years a whole new system of codes were devised which are based on huge prime numbers. These codes are, in all practicality, unbreakable simply by using modern computing methods. However, currently the Stanford-Berkeley-MIT-IBM quantum computation project is at an advanced state in creating a quantum computer...