A quantum security leap?

What is quantum security, what are the real world implications for the enterprise and is it really unbreakable? Davey Winder has been investigating...

By Davey Winder, 15 Sep 2010 at 16:29

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Unless you happen to be Sheldon Cooper, the ubergeek character from the Big Bang Theory TV comedy show, the chances are that the mere mention of the word quantum either throws you into a fit of confused despair or science fiction inspired laughter.

Yet it was almost exactly two years ago now that a very real computer network was protected by supposedly unbreakable quantum encryption for the first time. Physics beats maths in the world of encryption for once. Bazinga!

It was back in October 2008 that the worlds of science and security collided with something of a big bang as a team of research scientists used a quantum cryptography implementation to secure a network consisting of 200km of standard commercial fibre optic cabling to connect six locations in and around Vienna.

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1 comments

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RE:

A nice collection of sceptical opinions! I think you have missed a couple important points though.

1. While arguing that other components of security are weaker than encryption, you have to take into account that encryption is the basis and applies flatly to all your security, while human-factor and other weaknesses have to be exploited on a case by case basis. Every time the attacker has to make a new trick to exploit a particular weakness. However if the basis of security is broken, every secure system is broken at once. Therefore you need the basis of your securuty be as strong as possible. The basis of security has to be orders of magnitude stronger than all other narrowly applicable loopholes, just due to its importance.

2. Current commercial quantum key distribution solutions actually are a concatenation of the best classical encryption (public-key crypto, AES) and quantum key distribution. The encryption key for the data is a xor of a classical key and quantum-distributed key. One who buys these solutions gets double protection: to get to the data, both state-of-the-art classical crypto AND quantum crypto has to be broken at the same time.

By Vadim_Makarov on Sunday Sep 19