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Phoenix666 writes:

In the race for safer ciphers, China just quantum-leap frogged the rest of the world.

[...] Now, China aims to escape that contest entirely with the creation of a communication network not secured by math, but guaranteed by the fundamental rules of nature. A team has demonstrated mastery over the secret sauce behind such a "quantum internet" with their satellite Micius, which recently smashed the distance record for creating a bizarre link between light particles known as entanglement.

"They are years ahead of everyone else in this technology," says Vadim Makarov, head of a quantum hacking lab at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who was not involved. "It's absolutely awesome."

Launched August 2016, the Micius satellite successfully entangled photons between two Chinese towns almost 750 miles apart. The experiment bested former fiber-optics setups by a factor of 10, a feat chief architect Jian-Wei Pan says others dismissed as "a crazy idea" when he first proposed it back in 2003. The accomplishment proves possible the ultimate aim of cryptography: an invincible code system theoretically capable of instantly connecting any two (or more) points on Earth.

No Man-In-The-Middle for you!

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