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The Super-Secure Quantum Cable Hiding In the Holland Tunnel (bloombergquint.com)
Zorro shares a report: Commuters inching through rush-hour traffic in the Holland Tunnel between Lower Manhattan and New Jersey don't know it, but a technology likely to be the future of communication is being tested right outside their car windows. Running through the tunnel is a fiber-optic cable that harnesses the power of quantum mechanics to protect critical banking data from potential spies.
The cable's trick is a technology called quantum key distribution, or QKD. Any half-decent intelligence agency can physically tap normal fiber optics and intercept whatever messages the networks are carrying: They bend the cable with a small clamp, then use a specialized piece of hardware to split the beam of light that carries digital ones and zeros through the line. The people communicating have no way of knowing someone is eavesdropping, because they're still getting their messages without any perceptible delay.
QKD solves this problem by taking advantage of the quantum physics notion that light -- normally thought of as a wave -- can also behave like a particle. At each end of the fiber-optic line, QKD systems, which from the outside look like the generic black-box servers you might find in any data center, use lasers to fire data in weak pulses of light, each just a little bigger than a single photon. If any of the pulses' paths are interrupted and they don't arrive at the endpoint at the expected nanosecond, the sender and receiver know their communication has been compromised.
The cable's trick is a technology called quantum key distribution, or QKD. Any half-decent intelligence agency can physically tap normal fiber optics and intercept whatever messages the networks are carrying: They bend the cable with a small clamp, then use a specialized piece of hardware to split the beam of light that carries digital ones and zeros through the line. The people communicating have no way of knowing someone is eavesdropping, because they're still getting their messages without any perceptible delay.
QKD solves this problem by taking advantage of the quantum physics notion that light -- normally thought of as a wave -- can also behave like a particle. At each end of the fiber-optic line, QKD systems, which from the outside look like the generic black-box servers you might find in any data center, use lasers to fire data in weak pulses of light, each just a little bigger than a single photon. If any of the pulses' paths are interrupted and they don't arrive at the endpoint at the expected nanosecond, the sender and receiver know their communication has been compromised.
Change in rx power would trivially detect someone tapping the fiber. This is like intel 101
Unless the data going over the wire is thoroughly encrypted.
While the plebs get spyable cables.
Is this more sensitive than a TDR? A small drop in signal strength can typically be detected, and a break can be narrowed down to the centimeter.
[QUOTE]"use lasers to fire data in weak pulses of light, each just a little bigger than a single photon."[/QUOTE]
Light comes in units of photons. Saying, "just a little bigger than a single photon," doesn't make sense. Was it two photons? Is this an artifact of averaging and poor journalism, where the target was really 1 photon, and sometimes more are released?
What about protecting from jay on backhoe from braking it ? and after that does this need a lot bigger repair job then with other fiber?
Quantum Key Distribution has nothing to do with photons or pulses arriving at the correct time. It works because there is no way to make a perfect copy of a photon, so any part of the key that is intercepted can't also be sent to the intended destination. When part of the key is compared between both ends, it won't match, so they know not to use that key.
So what happens if dust gets in the way?
QKD is only as secure as your believe that the physical model "Quantum Mechanics as of today" describes reality completely. And that we already know not to be the case (as quantum mechanics do not even include the omnipresent phenomenon "gravity"). Nobody can say if a more precise model of reality will open up ways to intercept single photon transmissions without leaving traces.
QKD also solves no problems as conventional cryptography works very well (and its potential failure is not quite the number one threat to data security).
How is secure the system if there are back-doors implemented in hardware for 3 letter agencies?
How do you think the quantum safety having back-doors?
The governments are compromised by permitting spies to every compromised computers from citizens.
No, it's just a normal fiber, so repair time would be similar (6-12 hrs for an overlay, resplicing).. presumably you'd have a backup link, but if the qkd is broken, then your main link will be down as well. (the qkd link is a separate thing to the link actually carrying the traffic) - you could fall back to a different method of encryption if you wanted i guess, but then what's the point of having qkd?
call it what it is.. a QuantumLink
No. Quantum entanglement does not violate causality. All particles / information / marketing lies still have to be transported classically, below c.
Stolen from China which has this working since 2017 and much earlier for the shorter experiment setup.
I mean the Holland part. I know it's a tunnel.
Remember how difficult it was to get the congress-critters to understand how the internet works? Making rational laws for this type of tech is gonna be a real cluster fock.
unless you bend the cable enough, which can then create a wormhole and data can transfer FTL.
Is this an artifact of averaging and poor journalism, where the target was really 1 photon, and sometimes more are released?
I thought the phrasing was odd as well but took it to mean as you say here, a very few number of photons, close to one.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Quantum physics protects against this using Quantum Entanglement, aka "Spooky Action at a Distance" aka "the only action most /. readers will ever get" (obligatory, ducks/runs). What the Summary described is classic physics.
I like the way they let terrorists know the precise location of a valuable technical target.
Named after a guy called Holland.
Have gnu, will travel.
"If any of the pulses' paths are interrupted and they don't arrive at the endpoint at the expected nanosecond, the sender and receiver know their communication has been compromised" it is just plain damn light path measurement, and has nothing to do with real quantum encryption, and the no cloning theorem.
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visit randi.org
How about encrypting the data so that you don't care how many people capture the 1s and 0s going over the wire (be it electrical or optical) since none of them can make any sense of them without the decryption keys?
Probability.
The statistical odds that Jay will actually be operating a backhoe rather than being on a union negotiated break are vanishingly small in NYC.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why bother when most network traffic is already encrypted? Encryption is worthless if an attacker manages to get the digital keys used to encode and decode messages.
This is what forward secrecy is for.
Each key is usually extra-encrypted, but documents disclosed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 showed that the U.S. government, which hoovers up most of the worldâ(TM)s internet traffic, can also break those tougher codes.
Unless security vendors have made secret deals with god normal cryptography is still required to authenticate peers and just like normal systems compromise of keys is fatal to future communications.
Just like normal systems:
1. There are still keys that can be stolen.
2. There is still cryptography that can be compromised.
If any of the pulsesâ(TM) paths are interrupted and they donâ(TM)t arrive at the endpoint at the expected nanosecond, the sender and receiver know their communication has been compromised.
Given fiber only runs .67c this is hardly definitive of anything.
If it's _in_ the Holland Tunnel, it might be secure but it ain't safe.
The article implies the NSA can crack any crypto. Whoever wrote the article has a poor understanding of the Snowden leaks. According to the leaked documents, NSA has "major problems" breaking TOR, Truecrypt, Off The Record, etc. My guess is they probably can't even decrypt this stuff, but only want to de-anonymize it.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/inside-the-nsa-s-war-on-internet-security-a-1010361.html
But then this is Bloomberg aricle, so my expectations are already low.
I just messed with your cable. RED ALERT! Oh, someone just messed with it, stand down. I just messed with your cable. RED ALERT!
Who was the chief engineer
This is one of the few accurate posts in this discussion. Nobody seems to have picked up on the fact that quantum key distribution normally involves things like entangled particles, or some other form of spooky action at a distance.
more then that Also an 2 for one target
The Super-Secure Quantum Cable Hiding In the Holland Tunnel
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Now that we know it's there, it's only a matter of time before someone observes the cable and alters the outcome.
The optical fiber is actually in the Holland Tunnel. Also, is it or is it not Quantum Entanglement?
You can have a quantum state that is not an eigenstate of photon number, so various numbers of photons have some non-zero probability.
Don't worry, they also forgot "think of the children", and "if you've got nothing to hide". "But the terrorists might read the article!!" was probably just an oversight. They'll make sure to cater to all three freedom destroying memes the next time they report on an experimental QKD fibre duct in a busy tunnel. Exposing the location of the tunnel so it could be bombed and attacked during peak hour was probably a bit dumb. If that happened a couple of researchers would be really annoyed if it their QKD fibre line was damaged in the process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Most big hacks have been due to human factors, not someone breaking zillion-bit encryption.
This is a key agreement scheme for privacy. Someone wants to keep something secret forever. Today Alice and Bob can use regular encryption to prove they are talking to each other and agree on a secret key using certificates and things like Diffie-Hellman key exchange. We have know how to do this for almost 40 years. The problem with all of this though is that if someone records the Diffie-Hellman key exchange (or other key agreement scheme) and the subsequent communication and computing or math advances in the future to the point where the D-H key exchange can be broken then the communication will no longer be secret. Now if you are the government, communication you do today could be very embarrassing if it was revealed 20 or 30 years from now.
Right now we are back to suitcases with key tables. If an embassy wants to send something that must be kept secret for 50 years, it pretty much has to be physically delivered or the keys for the communication must be physically delivered. Everyone is recording as much communication as they can and trying to build a quantum computer to break the key exchanges. Who will be first? The Americans, the Chinese, the University of Waterloo with money from everyone else???
QKD is simple to understand, I send you a bunch of pulses of photons, you send me back the way you read them, I send you a list of the times you read them the correct way. We now have a subset of photons that we correctly exchanged that we can use as a key. Does it work? As others have pointed out, it only really works if you only send 1 photon at a time. It fails if I send lots of photons each time (which I really need to do) and our attacker has better equipment than we do (which they always will because they get to build theirs after we commit and deploy).
These finance outfits are leaking weak security details so their adversaries never suspect their real security measures.