"Making Hacking Futile – Quantum Cryptography"

An international team has successfully implemented an advanced form of quantum cryptography. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is secure against attacks on the communication channel but not against attacks or manipulations of the devices themselves. As a result, the devices could output a key that the manufacturer had previously saved and that may be forwarded to a hacker. It is different from device-independent QKD (DIQKD), which is a cryptographic protocol independent of the device. This method has been theoretically known since the 1990s, but it has only recently been experimentally realized for the first time by an international research team led by Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich physicist Harald Weinfurter and Charles Lim from the National University of Singapore (NUS). Through their method, secret keys can be generated with uncharacterized and potentially untrustworthy devices. Along with the LMU-NUS collaboration project, another research group from the University of Oxford demonstrated DIQKD. The researchers used a system comprised of two entangled ions in the same laboratory to accomplish this. These two projects lay the groundwork for future quantum networks in which guaranteed secure communication between distant locations is possible. One of the researchers' next objectives is to expand the system to include several entangled atom pairs, which will allow many more entanglement states to be generated, increasing the data rate and, ultimately, key security. This article continues to discuss the team's study on a DIQKD system for distant users.

SciTechDaily reports "Making Hacking Futile – Quantum Cryptography"