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posted by Cactus on Tuesday February 18 2014, @03:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the Making-the-NSA-cry dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Pav on Tuesday February 18 2014, @05:29PM

    by Pav (114) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @05:29PM (#1726)

    ...if stock crypto was actually usable our NSA problem would be less pressing. :-/ I'm having my own crypto issues [debian.org] (plugging my own bug report) right now, and I'm certainly not holding my breath for this quantum stuff, but I wonder how it'll be obfuscated and weakened if/when it does finally filter down to us?

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