Communications of the ACM
Scientists Expand Scale of Digital Snooping Alert
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Researchers at Toshiba's European research laboratory in Cambridge, England, have released a paper describing a way to enable a group of users to exchange encryption keys using an experimental technique called quantum key distribution. Although existing quantum-key systems protect only two computer users, the new system expands that to as many as 64 users, making the technology more cost-effective. While the technique does not prevent a breach, it alerts users that an outsider is listening to an optical network transmission.
Toshiba's technique is based on the ability to make the extremely short time measurements necessary to capture pulses of quantum light hidden in photon streams transmitted over fiber-optic links, within a network of dozens of users. Quantum cryptography depends on encoding a key in a stream of specially polarized photons, which makes a communication breach immediately apparent.
"One of the attractive things about quantum cryptography is that security comes in the form of the laws of nature," says Toshiba Research Europe's Andrew J. Shields. "It should, in principle, be secure forever."
From The New York Times
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