Hmmmmm.

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Cath@VWXYNot?

The BBC tells me that an unbreakable quantum encryption has been unveiled in Vienna.
Sounds pretty good, eh? Maybe they could use it to protect unsinkable ships.

About Cath@VWXYNot?

"one of the sillier science bloggers [...] I thought I should give a warning to the more staid members of the community." - Bob O'Hara, December 2010
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11 Responses to Hmmmmm.

  1. Bob O'Hara says:
    October 9, 2008 at 4:48 pm

    I would imagine that the first signal sent using it will be “Let me out of this box!” from Schrödinger’s cat.
    Hm. Or maybe not. I guess we can’t tell until it happens.

  2. Cath Ennis says:
    October 9, 2008 at 5:24 pm

    50-50, I’d say.
    I just don’t like the idea of entanglement going anywhere near my important grant files.

  3. Brian Clegg says:
    October 9, 2008 at 5:30 pm

    To be fair, entanglement-based encryption is pretty impressive. Incidentally, the BBC are a bit slow – I was at a lecture in Cambridge in 2005 where Zeilinger described this as already being done.

  4. Cath Ennis says:
    October 9, 2008 at 5:38 pm

    Oh I’m not knocking it, I’m sure it’s the most secure encryption to date. I just don’t believe that it’s “unbreakable”.

  5. Massimo Pinto says:
    October 9, 2008 at 6:21 pm

    They were on the cover of Seed a couple of months ago.

  6. steffi suhr says:
    October 9, 2008 at 6:42 pm

    Massimo – next time you link to an article like that, please add a warning. My head is still spinning.

  7. Brian Clegg says:
    October 9, 2008 at 7:25 pm

    Cath – there has been unbreakable encryption since the one time pad was invented in 1918. The encrypted message is totally impossible to break unless you have the key. Genuinely. Not just very hard like the public key encryption used on the internet. It’s impossible, because the message is literally a random string of characters without the key.
    But the one time pad system doesn’t guarantee the key is kept securely. And that’s where quantum encryption comes in. It provides a mechanism to generate the key at the time of use. The encryption is utterly unbreakable, because it is just a 1918 style one time pad, but the clever thing is the way it prevents the key from being discoverable.
    See my book The God Effect for more detail.

  8. Cath Ennis says:
    October 9, 2008 at 9:49 pm

    Lesson of the day: I should not post about things I don’t have the background to understand!

  9. Bob O'Hara says:
    October 10, 2008 at 5:44 am

    It’s a good way of getting an explanation from someone who does understand it, though.

  10. Massimo Pinto says:
    October 10, 2008 at 8:50 am

    Yup, Bob. Steffi, sorry to make your head spin. 8-}

  11. Cath Ennis says:
    October 11, 2008 at 12:59 am

    True! Better than starting to read, rereading the first paragraph twice, reverting to skimming, and then abandoning the quantum physics articles in New Scientist.

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