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Scientists Make Quantum Encryption Breakthrough

Posted by samzenpus on from the completely-secure-for-at-least-a-few-days dept.

Madas writes "Scientists working in Cambridge have managed to make quantum encryption completely secure (registration required) by putting decoy pulses in the key transmission stream. According to the story this paves the way for safe, encrypted high-speed data links. Could this allow completely private transmission of data away from snooping eyes and ears? Or will it mean film studios can stop movies from being copied when traveling on the internet?"

6 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Stop piracy? by Jordan+Catalano · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Or will it mean film studios can stop movies from being copied when traveling on the internet?

    No. Not at all.

    Quantum "encryption" foils interception of a data stream. That has nothing to do with copying a file and resending it once it reaches its destination.

    1. Re:Stop piracy? by Xenographic · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You'd think that people here would know better than to ask such silly things by now, wouldn't you? Does it really take that much thinking to realize that you can't give someone access to data and not give them access at the same time?

      Even if you had some special quantum device to allow people to watch something once, only to have its quantum state collapse (or whatever), you could still record the output. With a camcorder, if it came to that.

      "Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet." - Bruce Schneier, cryptography expert

  2. Editor, editor... by tgv · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What is the last sentence doing there: "Or will it mean film studios can stop ..."? It's clear from the preceding text that that (i.e., copy while travelling, not copy afterwards) is one of the potential uses. So it's completely redundant. At the same time, the implicature of this particular phrase suggests Something Bad: Big Companies are trying to stop You from your Right To Download, or something akin, implying that these "researchers" have hidden agendas and are enemies of open source, Linux, Ruby, Apache and probably of world peace. That's of course complete and utter nonsense, so the last sentence should have been cut out by the editor. Why didn't that happen? And what's the link to www.absolutegadget.com doing there? Who gains by putting this link on the /. front page?

  3. Re:Point to point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Not only that but the quantum channel has no way of verifying who the remote end really is. IE it can detect easedropping but not wholesale replacement of the intended target of communication.

    I dare anyone to cite a single practical benefit over existing zero knowledge key agreement systems.

  4. Re:Tag suggestion... by LordSnooty · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yeah, cos that's a great use of the tag system. Can't wait for the moment a few months hence where I need to find all articles where the headline wasn't proof-read. Just like I want to look up all the stories where someone made a mistake (search 'doh'), find all the Steve Balmer articles (search 'chairthrowing') or all the stories about problems for trad Slashdot villains (search: 'haha')

    The tag system is broken, but there's nothing wrong with the implementation. People can't tag correctly. Look below, all real tags.

  5. Re:Tag suggestion... by arevos · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It seems to me that the search system can already find articles via keywords. Tags are most useful when they add meta-information that cannot be inferred by a keyword search. Whilst it's unlikely "proofyourfuckingheadlines" is going to be useful for many people, tags like "haha" and "doh" might be conceivably useful, as they give information beyond a search for words in the article summary could provide.