I've actually seen these devices in operation. The thing that impressed me most was that the path need not be a single fiber from end to end - you can maintain quantum state across a switchable fiber junction. This means you are no longer limited to a single pair of boxes talking to each other. True, the SciAm article doesn't address a lot of issues, but the fact remains that this technology is interesting and important. Peter Trei
-----Original Message----- From: owner-cypherpunks@minder.net [mailto:owner-cypherpunks@minder.net]On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2005 6:17 AM To: transhumantech@yahoogroups.com Cc: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: Scientific American on Quantum Encryption
Scientific American has little clue, as usual (see their nanotechnology retraction).
Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/20/0358215 Posted by: samzenpus, on 2005-01-20 06:35:00
from the just-try-and-break-it dept. [1]prostoalex writes "Scientific American claims that [2]advances in commercially available quantum encryption might obsolete the existing factorization-based solutions: "The National Security Agency or one of the Federal Reserve banks can now buy a quantum-cryptographic system from two small companies - and more products are on the way. This new method of encryption represents the first major commercial implementation for what has become known as quantum information science, which blends quantum mechanics and information theory. The ultimate technology to emerge from the field may be a quantum computer so powerful that the only way to protect against its prodigious code-breaking capability may be to deploy quantum-cryptographic techniques.""