Quantum Crypto in the Real World

bednarz writes "Swiss officials are using quantum cryptography technology to protect voting ballots cast in the Geneva region of Switzerland during parliamentary elections to be held Oct. 21, marking the first time this type of advanced encryption will be used for election protection purposes. "We would like to provide optimal security conditions for the work of counting the ballots," said Robert Hensler, the Geneva State Chancellor. "In this context, the value added by quantum cryptography concerns not so much protection from outside attempts to interfere as the ability to verify that the data have not been corrupted in transit between entry and storage.""

Comments

I love this misguided attempt at security

[spagetti_code]

Its kinda like when someone says they are using 4096 bit encryption for their SSL banking, and not realising their password is being stolen by a keylogger.

The biggest problem we face today is *not* the encryption. We have bags of good encryption technologies out there, from AES (symmetric) to a variety of Public Key techniques. The problem actually comes from the people and processes at either end of the encryption pipe.

Guess what - no-ones SSID has (probably) ever been stolen while in transit via SSL over the internet. The millions of SSIDs stolen to date have been theft of laptops or admins not securing their websites properly. Hopefully they will understand this, and spend an equal portion of their time/energy securing their endpoints.