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It looked like just another conference call. A panel of suited men sat at a table, large white name tags and water bottles before them. The man in the center, illuminated by fluorescent lights, spoke to a camera in front of him.
[...] The mics, cameras, and screens made for a seemingly ordinary—maybe even boring—meeting-by-telepresence. But behind the scenes, physicists were encrypting the videostream using arguably the most secure technology in existence. Bai and his colleagues were participating on the first-ever intercontinental, quantum-encrypted video conference.
And on Friday, the Chinese and Austrian researchers who engineered the call published how they did it in Physical Review Letters. Led by physicist Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China, the team relied on networks of optical fiber, a handful of encryption algorithms, and a $100 million satellite that China launched in 2016—the only one specifically designed for quantum cryptography. "They've demonstrated a full infrastructure," says Caleb Christensen, the chief scientist at MagiQ Technologies, which makes quantum cryptography systems that connect a small number of users. "They've connected all the links. Nobody's done that with [quantum encryption] ever."
Story at: Wired
(Score: 4, Informative) by legont on Sunday January 21 2018, @09:44PM (7 children)
It was not quantum encryption, but just quantum keys exchange. A very important step indeed, but the announcement is misleading.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 21 2018, @10:33PM (6 children)
And the relevance of this observation is...?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @04:27AM (5 children)
It's susceptible to the usual attacks on the encrypted signal. This is just like using a preshared key that's exchanged out of band.
As the GP said, this is an important first step, but quantum encryption could offer far more protection, such as the ability to detect whether somebody else is listening in.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday January 22 2018, @08:54AM (4 children)
From the linked article, emphasis by me:
One-time pad encryption is the one classical encryption method that is provably secure. There are no attacks on it. Provably.
The only way to decode OTP-encrypted data is to get hold of the key. And that is what the quantum part is about: secure key sharing.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by tekk on Monday January 22 2018, @02:09PM (3 children)
Of course, the problem with OTP is that the key has to be as long as the message, which makes it impractical for just about anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @04:46PM
No, the length of the pad isn't what makes it impractical.
You can break up a message into blocks of whatever size you want and you could apply a new pad for each block.
The impracticality of one time pads lies with the transmission of the pad itself.
How do you transmit the pad to use securely? It has to be encrypted... using some other encryption method.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday January 22 2018, @07:33PM (1 child)
That's not a problem if you can non-locally generate the key on the fly. Which is exactly what the quantum part provides.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 23 2018, @09:14PM
Correct, the tricky part is transmitting to the message sender the pad (or if you prefer to call it key) *securely.*
My point was that the length of the pad having to match the length of the message is **not** the fundamental block to everyone using one time pad encryption.
It is the secure transmission of the pad (key) that is the obstacle.
Public key encryption is the worldwide standard because it doesn't have this problem.