PHYSICS NEWS -

 

QUANTUM NETWORK SECRETLY RUNNING FOR TWO YEARS

 

 

UPDATE BY io9  WEBSITE

Earlier this week, MIT’s Technology Review published an article claiming that a “government lab” has been secretly operating a “quantum internet” for over two years. Several other outlets ran with the story, including Popular Science and Wired.

 

But this idea, that a government-sponsored lab was secretly hacking away at the the Holy Grail of internet security, seemed too good to be true. So we contacted the lead researcher, Richard Hughes, to learn more about the project.

'Not a phrase we used’

“The MIT article doesn’t accurately characterize what we’ve been doing,” he told io9. “We are not part of the Internet, and that phrase — a quantum internet — is not something we used in our paper."

 

Rather, Hughes’s team created a network test bed for doing quantum cryptography over an optical fiber network. They’ve been running it to test their protocols and its performance, with the hope of using it to protect critical infrastructure, such as the electrical grid.

 

“Really, there’s nothing unusual about what’s been going on here for the past two-plus years,” says Hughes. “It’s just that we don’t tend to write papers until we have something interesting to report.”

 

As for the accusations of secrecy, the Los Alamos National Labs team was delayed in making their work public because they were filing for multiple patent

READ MORE: http://io9.com/did-government-scientists-really-create-a-secret-quantu-499792112

 

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ORIGINAL REPORT:

A US laboratory has devised a quantum network that would allow perfectly secure Internet communications.  This project is still a test, but when fully developed it could be the first economical and scalable quantum cryptography that could be used with existing fiber-optic networks. 

 

In cryptography, computers send coded messages that require a key to decipher. But existing encryption techniques aren't perfectly secure — with enough computational power and time, they can be hacked.  Enter quantum cryptography.

 

In  quantum mechanics when a photon of light travels from one point to another, it travels in an indeterminate state. An observer can't know it's orientation, or polarization, without disturbing the photon and changing its outcome. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Quantum Particles Explained]

 

Thus, if a secret message gets encrypted with a quantum key encoded in a photon's initial state, then any outsider trying to intercept the message would disturb the particles, thereby changing the key.

Read more:  http://www.livescience.com/29399-quantum-cryptography-network-running.html