Scientific American on Quantum Encryption

[Trei, Peter]

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 at minder.net
> [mailto:owner-cypherpunks at minder.net]On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl
> Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2005 6:17 AM
> To: transhumantech at yahoogroups.com
> Cc: cypherpunks at 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.""