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Quantum Cryptography Ready For Wide Adoption?
An anonymous reader points us to an interview with the founder of quantum cryptography pioneer MagiQ Technologies. From the article: "Q: When do you think we'll see service providers offer quantum cryptography services to their end-customers? A: This will happen within one year and we'll see fairly wide adoption within the next three years. We are working with big carriers such as Verizon and AT&T as well as some companies that own fiber networks. The goal is to embed quantum cryptography into the technology infrastructure so it becomes totally transparent to the end-user..." The cost of a pair of MagiQ boxes to implement point-to-point encryption on a 120-km link is $100,000 plus service.
The benefit of quantum cryptography is in secure key exchange. With regular systems you don't know if someone is sniffing the packets going through your fiber.
With quantum key exchange, the very act of diverting a photon to "sniff" it disturbs the signal enough that the far end can detect it.
Once you've exchanged keys (at a low bit-rate) you then use standard encryption techniques to exchange the actual data.