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BBN Announces Functional Quantum Encrypted Network
anzha writes "BBN Technologies has announced that under DARPA's Quantum Network Project to have built in conjunction with Harvard University the world's first functional quantum encrypted network. This is probably funded under DARPA's Quantum Information Science and Technology Program."
Patent-pending BBN protocols pave the way for robust quantum networks on a larger scale by ...
AND
We were ahead of the technology curve with the ARPANET and the first router, and our quantum network exemplifies the same kind of forward thinking and innovation that has made BBN a technology leader for over 50 years
All this would be just fine if it wasn't for the horrible P word. They've automatically, like all people who patent cryptography, made their entire idea completly unprofitable and made sure that no-one ever implements it. The thing is.. there's no market pressure to adopt this stuff.. we already have secure communication. Sure.. it's improved but so was eliptic curve cryptography but no-one uses that because of patents.
What a waste of time!
Simon.
...one of the DARPA IXO programs, Cougaar, has developed a fair number of message transport techniques over the last few years. Good times.
The Army reading list
I guess IPSEC or plain ol' SSH tunneling is more difficult to understand than quantum mechanics.
They say that because viewing a photon causes its properties to change you can tell if a message has been evesdropped, which is nice, but what good is that if you just sent the launch codes for a nuclear warhead? Hmmm... well George the codes were intercepted and the missles launched, but erm... we KNEW that it had happened!! No, just kidding, can someone explain why this is such a good thing, does it render that data unreadable or something, how does it work, the article is pretty bare, thanks in advance.
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
I know the theory is that quantum encryption is totally secure, as observing the data in transit actually changes it.
Can someone please explain how on earth this works?
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
...pairs at some point during the transmission (for instance when pumping the signal strength over distance)? Observing the entangled photon(s) would not change the originals...
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Harvard should link to http://www.harvard.edu/ or http://www.fas.harvard.edu/ if you want the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (the undergraduate institution that everybody loves) not "hardvard.edu".
Before I can get excited about quantum crypto, I want to know what attacks real networks suffer from and how quantum crypto prevents them.
While technologically do-able, I'm uncertain as to whether this will succeed in the commercial world.
I think we'll all just have to wait and see.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Great, so now if my router goes down my boss won't say "The internets gone!" Instead he'll say:
"Holy Fuck! There's a giant squid crawling out of a rip in space-time near the water cooler!"
"It's all just meme meme around here"
Well you see, the network is protected in this way - whenever you make an attempt to observe traffic on the network, you get scratched by a very angry cat whose position is superimposed with your own by way of quantum fluctuation. As there are an infinite number of cats, theoretically there are enough cats to scratch any number of would-be interlopers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
P2P filesharers everywhere have just creamed themselves.
I have been reading (snippets) about this subject for... well just as long as /. has been covering it.
But I understand that the tapping of this data means that the information is lost .
Isn't this the perfect dos attack ?
( just thought I'd plant a silly question )
-- forget
John Bigboote: We've had our chance. Your Overthruster's for shit. We're lost.
Lord John Whorfin: One more word out of you, Big-booty...
John Bigboote: BIG BOO-TAY. TAY. TAY.
So that the head of state can surf for porn in complete security.
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If they are using entagled photons it seems they can't ever use a repeater or amplify the signal. How do they get this to cover any reasonable distance...or do they just send a whole bunch of photons knowing some will get lost...if so I wonder how low the bit rate is.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
This is probably funded under DARPA's Quantum Information Science and Technology Program.
Because the more accurately we know the funding the less accuratly we know the results?
Truly this is quantum computing.
"What hath Heisenberg wrought?"
If you post it, they will read.
Answers to lots of your questions at quantum.bbn.com, which is the actual document repository used by the development team. I think it's pretty cool that they make so much material publically available. There's also an overview linked from the BBN homepage.
Although this is taking a page out of the Good Book by Bruce Schneier: The encryption algorithm/mechanics is never the weak link. There have been robust encryption algo's around for a very long time now.
When was the last time a security breach occured that was the result of someone brute-forcing an encrypted message or key?
The end-to-end system is what matters, as always. A keystroke sniffer installed via spyware is a vastly more economical approach to breaking an encrypted message. Which is exactly what happened to Half-Life 2, remember?
This 'quantum crypto' can ensure that the integrity of the encryption was not breached while in-transit...but then some goober will accidentally leave his WinXP laptop at some airport security screening location and POOF! there goes your unbreakable security.
Patent-pending BBN protocols pave the way for robust quantum networks on a larger scale by providing "any to any" networking of quantum cryptography through a mesh of passive optical switches and cryptographic key relays. Well, well... in previous posts, Assmasher and logicnazi noted the problem with repeaters and routers. It sounds like they are using passive switches, that is, purely optical switching (lenses, say) rather than "optical to electrical, do the switching, and back to optical". When that fails, they use a "cryptographic key relay" (I haven't found out what one of those is yet, but I'm guessing that it's a tamper-resistant harware gizmo that supposedly can handle cryptographic material securely).
Well, this is neat, but it's going to be a lot harder to build a network this way. Optical routers (purely optical, no converting to electrical) are pretty expensive. And every place you can't use an optical router or you need a repeater, you also need a cryptographic key relay.
And after all that, it's still going to be easier to compromise an endpoint or a cryptographic key relay, or to use ARP poisoning to set up a man-in-the-middle attack (what good is all that spiffy quantum crypto if the router routes it to the wrong recipient?)
To answer several questions at once, the short answer about how it works is a consequence of the uncertainty principle: when you observe a photon (or any particle, for that matter), you have to interact with it in some way. When you do that, you change some of its properties.
"Observing the entangled photon(s) would not change the originals..."
Not exactly true. Look into the EPR experiment and what's known as "spooky action." It turns out acting on one entangled photon instantaneously (faster than light) affects its partner. For what you're saying, though, this doesn't really matter, as no information can be transmitted this way (luckily). However, entangling photons requires letting them interact, which will disrupt the original.
It's amazing how low the information content is in this - especially considering how much some people are getting whipped up and making sweeping generalizations.
How many qbits? What kind of bandwidth? All optical point to point or switched? Transmission distance? What materials are being used for transport?
I'd love to know how many qbits they're playing with here to at least have a minor clue as to where the SOTA is...
For instance, if you measure the polarization of a photon, which was previously in a superposition of polarization states, in some sense you have created the new polarization of the photon, you have made it be what you measured it to be. So if I send you a diagonally polarized photon, and you measure it straight up and down, after it passes through your measuring device it will be purely straight up or straight down, whichever you measured it to be. So if somebody taps the line, we will be able to tell, because they will change the polarization of the photons I send you and you will get gibberish.
This is of course a bit simplistic, but that's the heart of the matter. Objectivity is dead. You are part of the system. If you observe it, you will inevitably have an effect on it. It's kind of cool.
The neat thing about this is that, assuming QM is correct, there is no way to circumvent it with new technology or more powerful computers or anything else. No matter how cool your tech is, you can't observe a system without changing it.
My site: Free Nature Pictures
Please try to get headlines right.
This is not quantum encryption. Photon entanglement simply allows the recipient to detect if someone was listening. It's much like a signature, only stronger (signatures only go bad if someone tries to modify the data; quantum state of entangled photons changes if anyone even looks at the data).
You don't want to send critical information over such a link. You use that link to send a symmetric encryption key. Then you use crypto.
Eve, a passive MITM (WITM), can prevent you from ever using crypto by keeping the link tapped. You keep sending crypto keys across, but each time you realize they've been compromised. You cannot get anywhere in that situation unless you use public key crypto, at which point the quantum-entangled nature of the link gets you no extra security.
Isn't all this what idQuantique ( http://www.idquantique.com/ ) has been working on and has products for, for a couple of years now?