A novel high-speed, high-security computing technology will be compatible with the "cloud computing" approach popular on the web, a study suggests.
Quantum computing will use the inherent uncertainties in quantum physics to carry out fast, complex computations.
A report in Science shows the trick can extend to "cloud" services such as Google Docs without loss of security.
This "blind quantum computing" can be carried out without a cloud computer ever knowing what the data is.
Quantum computing has been heralded as the most powerful potential successor to traditional, electronics-based computing.
One of the peculiarities of the branch of physics called quantum mechanics is that objects can be in more than one state at once, with the states of different objects tied together in ways that even Albert Einstein famously referred to as "spooky".