Bill
11-09-2006, 06:42 PM
It looks like the holy grail of information security and a totally secure internet has been discovered and a practical application built!
How long it will take to reach technical maturity is anybodies guess, but I hope it is fast, fast, fast!
QUANTUM ENCRYPTION - on the fly, and hopefully soon on a chip.
Do you guys have any idea what this will mean?
True internet money, for one.
Unforgeable, totally secure digital signatures.
Totally secure unbreakable privacy, that can be used for everything!
Literally, this will change the world. It's fantastic!
Combine this with the data teleportation discovered earlier in this year and you have faster-than-light, in fact instantaneous, totally secure information transfer. You know what that means? We can reach the near stars with robot ships, maybe even within the lifetime of the young people here.
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2006/tc20061106_302053.htm?campaign_id=bier_tcv.g3a.rss m1109z
--------------------------
The next step in security is quantum cryptography, and a few companies are developing encryption products using it. New York-based MagiQ Technologies is one of them. It builds boxes that harness the properties of quantum physics to create encryption keys it claims can't be broken.
Why is MagiQ so confident? Uncertainty. MagiQ's gear generates particles of light called photons, which are so small, the conventional rules of physics don't apply to them. In 1927 a German physicist named Werner Heisenberg found that merely observing a particle as small as a photon alters it. Once you look at it, it's never the same again.
Checkpoints
This is known as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and it turns out that if you use the state of a photon to generate an encryption key—essentially a secret set of random numbers—it's easy to determine whether anyone else has looked at it while trying to get a copy of the key you used.
"Uncertainty is the principle we exploit," says Mike LaGasse, MagiQ's vice-president for engineering. "It's fundamentally impossible to observe the key, because the photon can be measured once and only once. An eavesdropper can't measure it, and so can't get the key."
Magic combines a computer, a finely tuned laser, a photon detector, and a fiber-optic line. The laser inside the MagiQ QPN box is adjusted to produce single photons, which are then sent over the fiber-optic cable to a second QPN box, which detects them and notes precisely their time of arrival.
The two boxes then compare how the photon appeared when it left the first box to how it appears when it arrived at the second. If they match, the photon is used to generate a key, which is used to encrypt the data. If they don't match, the photon is ignored. The obvservations of each good photon are saved and used as needed to generate keys. This process repeats itself hundreds of times a second.
--------------------
How long it will take to reach technical maturity is anybodies guess, but I hope it is fast, fast, fast!
QUANTUM ENCRYPTION - on the fly, and hopefully soon on a chip.
Do you guys have any idea what this will mean?
True internet money, for one.
Unforgeable, totally secure digital signatures.
Totally secure unbreakable privacy, that can be used for everything!
Literally, this will change the world. It's fantastic!
Combine this with the data teleportation discovered earlier in this year and you have faster-than-light, in fact instantaneous, totally secure information transfer. You know what that means? We can reach the near stars with robot ships, maybe even within the lifetime of the young people here.
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2006/tc20061106_302053.htm?campaign_id=bier_tcv.g3a.rss m1109z
--------------------------
The next step in security is quantum cryptography, and a few companies are developing encryption products using it. New York-based MagiQ Technologies is one of them. It builds boxes that harness the properties of quantum physics to create encryption keys it claims can't be broken.
Why is MagiQ so confident? Uncertainty. MagiQ's gear generates particles of light called photons, which are so small, the conventional rules of physics don't apply to them. In 1927 a German physicist named Werner Heisenberg found that merely observing a particle as small as a photon alters it. Once you look at it, it's never the same again.
Checkpoints
This is known as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and it turns out that if you use the state of a photon to generate an encryption key—essentially a secret set of random numbers—it's easy to determine whether anyone else has looked at it while trying to get a copy of the key you used.
"Uncertainty is the principle we exploit," says Mike LaGasse, MagiQ's vice-president for engineering. "It's fundamentally impossible to observe the key, because the photon can be measured once and only once. An eavesdropper can't measure it, and so can't get the key."
Magic combines a computer, a finely tuned laser, a photon detector, and a fiber-optic line. The laser inside the MagiQ QPN box is adjusted to produce single photons, which are then sent over the fiber-optic cable to a second QPN box, which detects them and notes precisely their time of arrival.
The two boxes then compare how the photon appeared when it left the first box to how it appears when it arrived at the second. If they match, the photon is used to generate a key, which is used to encrypt the data. If they don't match, the photon is ignored. The obvservations of each good photon are saved and used as needed to generate keys. This process repeats itself hundreds of times a second.
--------------------