The Quantum key password distribuation hardware developed by engineer at Los Almos national laboratory called QkarD.Quantum cryptography is the use of physics, specifically quantum mechanics, to build secret codes.Banking, medical, business and government records around the world could be made secure from outside intruders.
As the name suggests, the idea is based on quantum mechanics .A branch of physics that explains the peculiar behavior of atomic and subatomic particles.Hackers or codebreakers have become increasingly adept at breaking the modern security that safeguards digital information. That’s because at the end of day, most types of computer encryption and passwords are based on a random number, and hackers are getting better at guessing or stealing those numbers.As the bad guys’ computers get better, faster and stronger, then in principle, those random numbers get easier to guess.”
Unlike classic computers that use electricity to represent information in binary bits (1s and 0s), quantum computers use photons to represent information as 1s, 0s or both values simultaneously.
“It can implement all the basic gates [or circuits] required for quantum computing,” said University of Bristol physicist Anthony Laing, who led the project. His group teamed with Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), a major telecommunications company, and their invention was reported in the journal Science.
Bristol University’s optical chip tests quantum theories with unprecedented speed. Quantum experiments that would otherwise months to a year can be completed in just minutes, even seconds, with this chip.
So MIT computer scientist Scott Aranson had a neat idea. He said instead of building the final package [quantum computer], let’s just build a quantum device ,that can specifically overthrow the Church-Turing thesis,” Laing said. The result was a phenomenon called boson sampling.
The devices could solve complex math problems, create new drugs or speed up your Google searches, but when used nefariously, they could tap your encrypted messages.
Quantum cryptography uses photons to send secret messages between two people. Think of it as a tin-can telephone, wherein a nylon string transmits two people’s voices via tin cans. With quantum cryptography, the string is replaced by a stream of photons — the basic unit of rays of light. So rather than sending email as electronic bits (1s and 0s), the two people send quantum messages using photons with two different physical states.
It’s impossible to copy or intercept these photons without altering them and alerting the message recipient. To return to the tin-can telephone analogy, it’s impossible for an eavesdropper to intercept a quantum message without cutting the string.“It would be the niche of absolutely secure communication. It means no one could break it. It’ll stay secure for 10, 20, 30 years down the road
However, distance is a major impediment to quantum messages, as photons tend to be absorbed or disturbed the further that they travel through a fiber optic cable.
“Several papers show an upper limits of 124 to 186 miles. Also, the longer that you go, the lower the rate. The question is how useful is sending data 186 miles at one bit per second, when everything in modern telecommunications goes at megabits and gigabits per second?” said Sergienko
Earlier this month, it unveiled a quantum-based generator that creates random numbers — the same random numbers that fuel passwords and other current forms of digital security. Unlike passwords made by conventional computers, these quantum passcodes (or keys) would be difficult to guess by brute force.
Quantum random number generator churns out encrypted passcodes/keys so fast that it could make life harder for hackers to decrypt the password
“Our quantum random number generator generates entropy so rapidly that one could create new cryptographic keys very rapidly and not need to reuse keys,” said Los Alamos physicist and leader of the quantum communications team Raymond Newell. “As an analogy, if you only have one key, you’ll need to build all your locks to match it, and anyone who steals your key can open all your locks. But if you have many many keys, you can build a different lock for each [door], and anyone who steals a key can open only one lock.”
