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First Secure Quantum Crypto Network Up and Running
John Lam was one of many readers to send in news that on Thursday, "at a conference in Vienna, Austria, as reported by the BBC, a European Community science working group built a quantum backbone using 200-km of standard commercial optical fiber running among seven sites and successfully demonstrated the first secure quantum cryptographic key distribution network. In addition, each of the seven links used a different kind of quantum encryption, demonstrating interoperability between the technologies. To paraphrase, the project focused on the trusted repeater paradigm and developed an architecture allowing seamless integration of heterogeneous quantum-key distribution-link devices in a unified framework. Network node-modules managing all classical communication tasks provide the underlying quantum devices with authentic classical channels. The node-module architecture uses a layered model to provision network-wide, end-to-end, provably secure key distribution."
from TFA "Albert Einstein, who discovered the quantum properties of photons of light - indeed, discovered the very concept of the photon - always resisted quantum theory's spooky behaviour, "God does not play dice", being among his oft-quoted objections.
But experiments eventually proved that he apparently does, and also laid the technical foundations for today's quantum information revolution - cryptography, teleportation, and computation."
Teleportation? Did I miss something here? Has matter been teleported or is this just speculation?
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I've always wondered what type of encryption was used in Star Trek episodes when it was announced that there was an encrypted subspace channel for Picard.
You'll be able to tell if your web traffic has been snooped by the authorities because all your lolcats will arrive dead!
Under DARPA sponsorship, and together with our academic colleagues Harvard University and Boston University, BBN Technologies has recently built and begun to operate the world's first Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) network. The DARPA Quantum Network employs 24x7 quantum cryptography to provide unprecedented levels of security for standard Internet traffic flows such as web-browsing, e-commerce, and streaming video.
The DARPA Quantum Network became fully operational on October 23, 2003 in BBN's laboratories, and has run continuously since.
source: http://bbn.com/technology/information_security/quantum_cryptography
I'm trying to read it, you insensitve clods!
Seriously, can we have this tag blocked or something?
Summation 2
An other nail to poor bastard's coffin. Noone thinks about where they go and what they do after loosing their jobs as hackers. Cruel world, it is.
"...seamless integration of heterogeneous quantum-key distribution-link devices in a unified framework."
My buzzword alarm just core dumped.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Wanted: Schrödinger's Cat. Dead and alive.
More like: to make the subject even more unintelligible...
I heard something about this on the radio last night (wasn't paying full attention).
But they were talking about quantum key exchange. Assuming that they're then using a standard symmetric key to encrypt the link it's still theoretically breakable, just the key exchange that isn't.
If they're quantum encrypting all the data then that's pretty astonishing - they were talking about video-conferencing so they need a reasonable bit rate and the fidelity rate has to be above 5/6[1] otherwise the link might be vulnerable to a quantum cloning attack.
[1] Assuming the best attack is a universal quantum cloning machine. The maximum theoretical fidelity isn't known for most non-universal quantum cloning machines (but is trivially known for some - e.g. 3/4 for a naive measure and retransmit). I don't know whether it's possible to prove that the 5/6 is a sufficient lower bound on the fidelity.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
So, we have quantum computers with quantum networks doing quantum cryptography. What's next, buying music with quantum DRM, i.e. the song is both there and not there until the sound card observes it? ;)
Pity Austria has no secrets worth hiding. Except for the not-so-secret of their apparently successful quantum network.
BTW how do they know that their secrets are safe? Only if somebody cracks them. But how will they know that? If they know they have been cracked then perhaps there will be an equal probability that they haven't been?
If it rellies on the concept of "trusted relays", it is not really secure. Point to point cryptography can be secure, but when you start to depend on third parties, how can you be sure?
Rethinking email
..." trusted repeater paradigm "...
Okay, so basically you're only 'secure' up to about 30 miles, and that's only if you have a real, honest to goodness, point to point fiber link. Otherwise they're still converting photons to electrons, and making new photons, at the repeaters.
It's no more secure than current fiber, except that you've limited the attack vector and locations to known points, namely the repeaters.
As more and more people are worried about their ISPs sniffing their data, will this type of system be available for use with clients running on the user's machine such as for Web, E-mail, P2P, etc?
Uncle Mantis
or both
That NSA submarine that spliced all those cables in the Middle East will never be able to navigate to Vienna. So no taps.
Or do you think the NSA might say: "NSA can't tap cable. NSA smash cable!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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Quantum key distribution (QKD) relies on the fact that a single measurement can only reveal partial information about its state. i.e. The same fundamental physical property that makes QKD work also makes it impossible to "read" a photon at a trusted repeater station and then resend an identical copy. This would violate the "no cloning" theorem. Instead, the trusted repeater would have to exchange a key with both the sender and receiver. This obviously requires trust and slows things down, but it's not unreasonable in a European bank network where many banks that both trust each other are physically located within a short distance of each other. (Current QKD is limited to links of distances of about 150 km due to loss in fiber, and the secret key bitrates at these distances are not good.)
End point to end point QKD is possible with what are called quantum repeaters. In this scheme, the repeater station creates single photon pairs and sends them to the adjacent links in the chain. At each link, bell state measurements are performed that create a daisy-chain of entanglement swapping until, ultimately, the sender and receiver at the two ends of the chain are left with an entangled pair that they can use to create a key. In this scheme, the repeaters actually gain no information about the entangled pair that the sender and receiver wind up with, and the sender and receiver are able to detect tampering just as they can with other forms of QKD. The result is a repeater network over which secure communication is possible even if the repeaters are untrusted. The worst case scenario, theoretically, is that the eavesdropper just cuts the line so that communication isn't possible.
This technology works experimentally, but will not be practical until quantum memory (i.e. light storage) becomes practical. The problem is that, without memory, each link in the entanglement chain has to receive photons at the same instant in time. With loss happening randomly in all the links, the probability of this happening is no greater than the probability of a photon traveling directly from the sender to the receiver. Ergo, you gain nothing.
Quantum memory is a hot field of research and several experimental groups have shown promising results using a variety of approaches. In short, QKD will not be limited to trusted relay networks for long.
Hence the "and"
All suns in the universe are connected and can be utilized as a quantum communication network.
Welcome to the universes internet.
Find me bitches.
@efnet
that's what you think.
The suns of the universe can be used as a quantum communication network. Figure it out. I need of this planet.
I read about it in a CS paper from a while ago.
Do not trust this signature.
The wiki article posted earlier will give you more information, but let me tell you the depressing upshot.
Nothing is really being teleported. Nothing can be transported faster than the speed of light using quantum teleportation. Not even information. Especially not information.
There is a quantum interaction between two particles that happens instantly, but the particles themselves, and all the information contained in those particles, was transfered at sub-light speed when you separated them.
It's still useful, just not for anything you would normally associate the words "teleportation" or "instantaneous" with. :P
The enemies of Democracy are
all IT professionals now required to have a degree in quantum mechanics. lol at the concept. lol at the BBC. lol at my post because it's rather stupid. good day.
If you try to measure something at quantum level then you mess up with the state of that something.
Or something like that.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have been there, and can give my impresson. I think, this is a big milestone for quantum cryptography. This has been the most massive and convincing demonstration of the technology up to the date, nothing like any before. Yet, it seems to have received relatively little press attention.
The demonstration was a conclusion of an European project in which several tens of research groups collaborated. The main thing it produced are network protocols for a quantum cryptography network. Several months ago, the plan for this demo was four quantum cryptographic links. However, it was easy to plug any quantum crypto link into the network, so six research groups and one commercial company ended up bringing their systems to Vienna (the latter, idQuantique, actually contributed three links to the network).
Out of these nine systems, seven performed flawlessly for several days, one worked for half an hour and then died (the secure key produced in the first half an hour was still used by the network; the failure was blamed on a software problem in that system), and one prototype did not quite survive the flight to Vienna (hard disk was trashed by baggage handlers). Given that most of the systems were research prototypes, the statistics actually looks good to me.
Since the network topology allowed for redundant paths between most of the nodes, the actual failure of one link and simulated failure of another did not prevent the network from operating. (The network topology on the picture as not quite complete: at the last moment, eighth link and one more node were added off the topmost node.) During the demo, there were shown securely encrypted video links between the nodes, and telephone calls. The video links were encrypted with AES with session keys provided by the network. The telephone calls were encrypted with one-time-pad provided by the network. Resiliency to failures was demonstrated: one link was broken on purpose (eavesdropping was simulated by inserting a polarizer), and a key store in another was exhausted during one of the one-time-pad encrypted calls. In both cases, the key distribution was automatically re-routed through other paths and nodes.
The network software implemented so far requires all nodes be trusted and secure. However, I know that algorithms are under development that would allow secure key distribution in a bigger network where up to a certain percentage of nodes might have been compromised.
The demo was on the first day of the meeting. The other two days were just a very good research conference, with no press attending. I apologize if I got some details above not fully correct.
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