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posted by chromas on Monday November 04 2019, @03:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the coming-to-a-credit-card-near-you dept.

Up until now, QKD (Quantum Key Distribution) required devices the size of a refrigerator or larger. Now researchers have developed a QKD chip a mere 3 millimeters in size.

So why is QKD so important? Right now, when we encrypt data we generally use passwords or biometric data, which can be hacked or leaked.

Quantum technology, however, allows us to encrypt the key within the message. Only the person with the exact same key as the one inside the message can open it.

"It is like sending a secured letter," says physicist Kwek Leong Chuan, from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. "Imagine that the person who wrote the letter locked the message in an envelope with its key also inside it. The recipient needs the same key to open it."

The applications for QKD such as something that can be worn on your wrist or in a smartphone are significant in commerce, security, and next generation communications. Additionally, the new solution

developed by the scientists at NTU should be relatively easy and cheap to produce, as it uses standard industry materials like silicon, that are already widely used in computer manufacturing.

Certainly easier than carrying around a refrigerator.

Journal Reference
Zhang, G., Haw, J.Y., Cai, H. et al. An integrated silicon photonic chip platform for continuous-variable quantum key distribution.[$] Nat. Photonics (2019) doi:10.1038/s41566-019-0504-5


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by FatPhil on Monday November 04 2019, @10:40PM (3 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday November 04 2019, @10:40PM (#915993) Homepage
    They aren't quantum keys. They are just keys. It is the technique for agreeing on a key that is quantum, not the keys themselves.

    Note - this is pure bullshit:
    "Quantum technology, however, allows us to encrypt the key within the message. Only the person with the exact same key as the one inside the message can open it."

    Once you've distributed the key using the quantum technique, you're free to use any other non-quantum technique, which is typically going to be much faster than any quantum technique. Chose your key length and algorithm to provide you with the security you need.

    To repeat for clarity - key exchange and message encryption are separate processes. The key is not "encrypted within the message", and there is no "person with the exact same key" until after you've performed the key exchange.

    And they are kinda proved, it's decade-old tech in the real world.

    Here's a version you can play around with at home: http://fatphil.org/crypto/QKE.html
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @05:41AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @05:41AM (#917786)
    Quantum is hardly proven, at least to the majority of us. Don't go shilling it without evidence when you have an obvious conflict of interest.
    • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday November 08 2019, @09:26AM

      by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 08 2019, @09:26AM (#917817) Journal
      I don't think he claimed that quantum is proved. He was saying, if I read it correctly, that key exchange and message encryption are proven technology because we have been using them for decades.
    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday November 11 2019, @10:38AM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday November 11 2019, @10:38AM (#918888) Homepage
      > you have an obvious conflict of interest

      How so? I've been to a course of lectures on the subject and learnt enough from those to ask very tricky questions of the lecturer afterwards. That's not called a "conflict of interest", that's called an "education".
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves