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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
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
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.
...as observing the data in transit actually changes it
Quantum mechanical systems, unlike classical systems, can exist in a superposition of states. A classical bit for example, can only be either 0 or 1, while a quantum bit, or qubit, can exist as both 0 and 1 at the same time with some probability. Hence, when you 'observe' a quantum system, the system is forced to be (I won't use the word collapse here!) in a new state consistent with the apparatus or observable you used to observe it. That's an oversimplified explanation. Go to the tutorials section at the Cambridge Quantum Computing website for more tutorials and simple reading on how this stuff works, including some very cool articles by Artur Ekert, who independantly discovered quantum crypto
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.