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Quantum Cryptography Gets Nanotube Boost

Posted by timothy on from the sending-secret-stuff dept.

c1ay writes "In an article at the ScienceDaily News it is reported that two researchers at the University of Rochester have discovered a new property of carbon nanotubes, ideal photon emission. "The emission bandwidth is as narrow as you can get at room temperature," says Lukas Novotny, professor of optics at Rochester and co-author of the study. Such a narrow and steady emission can make such fields as quantum cryptography and single-molecule sensors a practical reality. RSA and Elliptic Curve wouldn't stand a chance against this unbreakable encryption."

2 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. Doesn't address the real problem by Mrs.+Grundy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    RSA and Elliptic Curve wouldn't stand a chance against this unbreakable encryption."

    And crackers don't really stand a chance against the algorithms we have now. Although I'm happy to see them inventing cool stuff and cryptography os definitely neat, will this makes us more secure? Sure computers keep getting better and you need to stay ahead of the curve if you are someone like the NSA, but are people the loosing the security game because their 128 bit RSA keys keep getting cracked ? No. They are insecure because they have nanotube-size brains and use their birthday for their password or they leave a laptop with the vice president's agenda at a convenience store.

  2. Quantum encryption isn't encryption by Cardbox · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What we normally mean by "encryption" is "the transformation of readable stuff into stuff that can be seen by evil people without them able to understand anything". Encrypted data are a stream of bits just like anything else. Thus you can store your encrypted message on a disk, or write it down, or transmit it over a wire, or broadcast it.

    In this sense "quantum encryption" isn't encryption at all. Quantum encryption is something that can only happen as part of the act of transmission. There is no such thing as "quantum-encrypted data" that can be recorded or written down or transmitted over conventional media. The act of doing any of those things collapses the wave packet and destroys communication just as effectively as interception would.

    I'm not going to argue that we should start calling quantum encryption something else, the name is too snappy and too useful for getting research grants, but let's not get confused into comparing it with public-key or even private-key encryption: they're completely different animals.