Slashdot Mirror
Quantum Cryptography Systems Commercially Launched
prostoalex writes "NY-based MagiQ has now started commercial shipments of its quantum cryptography systems, which it claims is the first commercially available device of its type. Apparently, 'Quantum cryptography goes a step further than electronic cryptography through its employment of a stream of photons, the quantum properties of which determine the key. The fun part is that if an intruder observes or intercepts the transmission, those properties get changed'." We've previously run stories on advances in quantum cryptography.
I tried to read the article, but I couldn't find the bloody thing! I'm used to that though, but the part that boggles me is, "Was this the standard Slashdot Effect or was it Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle?"
More worrying: Are they somehow related?
I'll leave that one to deeper minds.
----- "Oh, Stewardess! I speak l33t!"
For those in the audience that dont get the 'I-lost-my-cat-dept' it's in reference to Schrodinger's cat, a quantum theory of superposition. You can find what it's about here.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Startup MagiQ Technologies Inc. yesterday announced it's shipping what appears to be the first security system based on quantum cryptography (see MagiQ Ships Quantum Crypto ).
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Quantum cryptography goes a step further than electronic cryptography through its employment of a stream of photons, the quantum properties of which determine the key. The fun part is that if an intruder observes or intercepts the transmission, those properties get changed -- an unavoidable principle of quantum mechanics -- meaning the sender and receiver can tell if anyone is eavesdropping. Perhaps more important, the key can't be copied or faked (see Optical Science Gets Spookier and Quantum Cipher Sent by Fiber ).
It's a potential breaththrough, though working with photons has never been easy, and, as the optical networking bubble has shown, it can be an expensive way to build technology.
MagiQ's Navajo system, a box made to fit in a standard telecom rack, was unveiled in February and began beta trials in March (see MagiQ Demos Quantum Cryptography ).
MagiQ says Navajo performs the usual triple-DES and AES encryption standards. What's special is the transmission of the key, a string of random bits used to decipher messages. Computers normally use a random number for the key, producing encryption schemes that could be broken if enough computing power were made available.
"There's a big vulnerability people see, because optical fiber is very easy to tap," says Bob Gelfond, MagiQ CEO, citing one carrier that was finding taps in its Manhattan office "several times a week."
Using a quantum crypto scheme can defend against such taps. In addition to the obvious government and military customers, quantum cryptography is finding interest in the financial sector, for protecting backups or real-time traffic. Another target market would be any industry needing to protect intellectual property -- not just high-tech firms, but businesses such as automotive firms or tire manufacturers, Gelfond says.
But the real market may be the carriers themselves, he notes, simply because they're looking for revenue sources. Quantum cryptography could become a premium service for them. With that in mind, MagiQ is aiming for a price -- around $50,000 to $100,000, depending on features -- that's comparable to other add-ons such as VPN boxes.
Several other companies are working on quantum cryptography, but few appear to be interested in selling a complete system. Swiss firm ID Quantique is trying to commercialize quantum cryptography but so far offers only components such as a photon detector. ID Quantique recently partnered with other Swiss firms to expand its work into a quantum cryptography infrastructure (see Partners Promote Quantum Cryptography ).
Elsewhere, large companies, including IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM - message board), Mitsubishi Electric Corp., NEC Corp. (Nasdaq: NIPNY - message board; Tokyo: 6701), and Toshiba Corp. (Tokyo: 6502 - message board), are investigating the area more as a research project, with promising results but no products planned for the near future. "The big guys doing the research are not coming out with anything for a least a couple of years, as far as we know," Geldfond says. (See NEC Transmits Quanta , Japanese Claim Transmission Record , and Mitsubishi Creates Quantum Crypto
So, while MagiQ isn't alone in pursuing quantum cryptography, the company's taken a different approach. "Where we started to break new ground was in putting the engineers into the mix, guys who had substantial experience -- Sycamore guys, Tektronix guys," Gelfond says.
MagiQ employs 22, with offices based in New York. Founded in 1999, the company has been powered by roughly $6.9 million in angel funding (see Quantum Crypto Company Launches ).
In addition to Navajo, MagiQ is offering a box that only generates the quantum keys, intended as a tool for research outfits and universities.
-- Craig Matsumoto, Senior Editor, Light Reading
The setup consists of two rackmount units connected by both optical and Ethernet cables.
So... do the boxes have to be close enough to run the optical cables directly? Can the signal be regenerated or amplified without disturbing the photons? (I doubt it.) How about sending the photon stream through a DWDM switch? (Again, I doubt it.)
If the pair of boxes has to be in the same building, that isn't going to be a big seller. Bob would just walk down and HAND Alice the data.
Nice PR stunt, though.
Oh, I really want to know what telco is finding multiple taps a week to their optical fibers. I really smell bullshit here.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Yeah, but due to the nature of the the quantum portion, don't you have to have an unbroken end to end fiber connection with optical breaks for things like switching equipment? It seems that a repeater would change the polarization of the signal and kill the protocol.
But it is not likely to become widely available any time soon. The problem with quantum encryption, is that it is based on quantum states. These states are destroyed when observer (literally, you just have to look at them!), so it's not possible to read the data out and perform a "quantum dictionary attack", because how you read the data is part of the encryption
:)
This is what makes quantum encryption perfect. If somebody has even read the signal, you will know it. If they haven't, the problem is solved.
However, in order to make use of this perfect encryption, the quantum state must not change. Therefore, any obstacle along the way (imperfections in the fiber optic cable, or any attempts to read the signal) will destroy the signal. This means that a quantum encrypted message cannot be transmitted through a switched network. Every switch (as we know them) would have to read the data, and pass them along. That is not possible.
Instead, a technique known as Quantum Teleportation could be used. It's developed mainly in Denmark, and uses something called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-beams to transport the quantum state. The catch is that they never read the state, because that would crush it. They simply transport it on a carrier wave, much like in Star Trek
With great numbers come great responsibility!
And the unbelievably fuzzy sense of humour of slashdot moderators strikes again. It's weird how all you need to post to get modded +5 funny is something that *looks* like a joke. It doesn't actually have to be a joke or be funny in any way, so long as it has the right general shape or form and the appropriate keywords, it will be modded +5 funny.
I actually tested this at one point. Here's the post I made. Thoroughly unfunny, no matter how twisted your sense of humour, but kind of looks like a joke. And of course it got modded +5 funny. Do slashdot mods mod it up out of fear for their own intelligence? Thinking maybe they're just not getting the joke but it's actually really funny because it looks like a joke?
Who knows. I'd be interested in finding out. Any thoughts anyone?
Daniel
Carpe Diem
I don't think amplification is going to do you good. If this implements the first quantum key exchange protocol, designed by Gilles Brassard and others (notably this is the easiest one to implement using present-day technology so far), they actually work by transmitting single photons one at a time, with the transmitter whom we shall call Alice (the one generating the key to be used for your subsequent symmetric cryptography) controlling the polarization. The recipient of the photons (Bob) then measures the polarization, then depending on whether the answer was correct or not decide what the value of the key bits should be. Doesn't matter if Eve is able to eavesdrop on the classical channel where they're communicating about polarization methods, Brassard and his colleagues showed that she will not be able to gain any information about the key Bob is receiving from there. If Eve tries to tap into the photon stream she'll be noticed by Alice and Bob because of the way her measurements are affecting Bob's measurements... Anyone feel free to correct me on this, I don't have Brassard's paper with me on hand at the moment and can't find it on the web, so I've been just going by it from memory.
(in case you haven't yet noticed, this quantum cryptographic protocol, like most the others I've come across, is a key exchange protocol that works as a replacement for Diffie-Hellman or something similar).
The upshot is that the fiber cable here will be from the point of view of conventional fiber optic equipment a dark fiber. Light intensity is so low that only specialized equipment can detect it. Anything else inside the fiber, be it an amplifier or a DWDM switch, or whatever else, won't recognize the transmission and may do something totally unexpected that breaks the protocol. Bob could always be reading the wrong polarization, and hence Alice would have to keep discarding key bits. However, apparently there are excellent fiber cables that can go for several kilometers and still maintain the kind of integrity required for the protocol (IIRC, Brassard mentions somewhere that as early as 1996 someone actually built a real setup employing his protocol, over a 15km fiber optic cable).
Other quantum key exchange protocols I've come across are noticeably similar, and suffer from the many of the same limitations.
The only use that I can see for this is if you're someone with the resources to lay your own fiber around, say if you have a large complex covering several acres, and are more paranoid than the NSA. There is a market, I think, but that market looks more like the military and intelligence agencies of large industrialized nations. Building such an infrastructure could cost billions, even if you all you wanted to do was securely interconnect several dispersed branch offices in one large city...
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
By the way, I've found a link to the paper I mention above. It's the paper by Charles Bennett, Francois Bessette, Gilles Brassard, Louis Salvail, and John Smolin, "Experimental Quantum Cryptography" (Citeseer link).
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Bah, who's the evil mod with a twisted sense of humour who modded my post +1 funny? Come out and fight fair!! :-P
Daniel
Carpe Diem
So even if this is really workable quantum cryptography, in which case it would only work on a direct fiber to fiber link. I don't see how it would give any benefit.
From a technical point of view Quantum cryptography is only secure against man in the middle attacks if you have a SEPERATE channell to the remote host that you are absolutely sure in fact goes to the right person. As long as all communication goes over the fiber nothing prevents a spy from splicing his own box into the line and negotiating a key using quantum cryptography for both parties. However, if you have some channell that you know reaches the other source you can just use Diffie-Helman or like protocal to negotiate a shared key without ever broadcasting it on the line.
The only think quantum cryptography does for you is take the public key component out of the equation. However from reading the article this box just uses quantum encryption to negotiate a key for 3-DES or similar. Seems to me that the public key is not the weakest link in the system. Also as it does packet based encryption you can still watch and time packets to observe keystrokes (I believe good ssh and the like programs wait for several seconds to try and send a bunch of keystrokes together, but a box that sits outside the computer can't decode the first layer of encryption to stick the packets together in a meaningfull way...though I could be wrong on this).
From a pragmatic point of view, since this is only going to work on an unbroken single fiber there is some limit to distance here. I'm sure someone else on slashdot knows about how long you can string fiber before you need a repeater or something. Wouldn't it be easier to just routinely check to make sure there is no middle man inserted in the wire (use diffie-helman or similar again so that someone JUST listening can't decode things). Even better, take a key generated on the first computer BY HAND to the other end of the communications loop. Better cheaper security with no new high tech gizmos.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
It may be funny in some contexts, but NOT in the context of a thread about some new solar power cells. It simply made no sense in that context. Not only that, but it's a very well-worn joke. Certainly most people will have heard the expression before. Why would a solar-powered flashlight become achievable because of cheap power cells? If I had said "affordable" possibly someone with a bad sense of humour could have found it funny, but with "achievable", wtf?
Next in my experimentation I will post something which actually does not make any sense at all, not even grammatical, but looks like a joke. I bet it'll be modded up funny, too.
Daniel
Carpe Diem