aliks writes:
"The practical applications of quantum encryption may be getting closer. A paper published in Physical Review Letters by Vedran Dunjko, Petros Wallden, and Erika Andersson presents a way to use Quantum Digital Signatures without requiring long term quantum memory.
Phys.org
provides a summary:
Quantum digital signatures (QDSs) allow the sending of messages from one sender to multiple recipients, with the guarantee that messages cannot be forged or tampered with. Additionally, messages cannot be repudiated; if one recipient accepts a message, she is guaranteed that others will accept the same message as well. While messaging with these types of security guarantees are routinely performed in the modern digital world, current technologies only offer security under computational assumptions. QDSs, on the other hand, offer security guaranteed by quantum mechanics. All of the variants of QDSs proposed thus far require long-term, high quality quantum memory, making them unfeasible in the foreseeable future. Here, we present a QDS scheme where no quantum memory is required, which also needs just linear optics. This makes QDSs feasible with current technology."
[Ed. Note] The Physical Review Letters link has all the fun details, but Phys.org provides a more understandable article for the layperson.
(Score: 5, Informative) by mattie_p on Tuesday February 18 2014, @04:46PM
Thanks, Techwolf. We're implementing a system where two editors need to sign off on an article before it gets published. So while Cactus did the first pass, I caught a few things that he missed. I'm glad I was able to do so, because some of the stories I published without having a second set of eyes on had glaring errors. Those errors were pointed out to me in the comments or on IRC, and I was able to fix them. However, better to minimize the errors in the first place than to have a 100% fix rate. Thanks for reading.
Also, go Physics! ~mattie_p
(Score: 1) by aliks on Tuesday February 18 2014, @10:58PM
Actually this was my first submission ever, so I was extra careful to make it good, nice to see I hit the mark.
Thx for the edit - I'll remember that point next time.
To err is human, to comment divine