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Quantum-secured communication

Francesco Petruccione, Abdul Mirza

Published Jan 1, 2010• 1 citation
OpenAlex

Abstract

Cryptography has been around for decades. So long in fact, that code breakers abound. Now, quantum physics is providing secure keys to confound the code breakers, as Francesco Petruccione and Abdul Mirza show us.

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In a series of recent experiments a radical new technique has been demonstrated that could have far-reaching consequences for the way in which the confidentiality and integrity of our networks is protected. This technique, known as quantum cryptography, is the result of a synthesis of ideas from fundamental quantum physics and classical encryption and has lead to a radical new approach to the business of secure communications. We review the origins of and developments in this rapidly growing field and assess the current status of both the theory and the experiments.
For thousands of years, code-makers and code-breakers have been competing for supremacy. Their arsenals may soon include a powerful new weapon: quantum mechanics. Cryptography — the art of code-making — has a long history of military and diplomatic applications, dating back to the Babylonians. In World World Two, the Allies ’ feat of breaking the legendary German code, Enigma, contributed greatly to the final Allied victory. Nowadays, cryptography is becoming increasingly important in commercial applications for electronic business and electronic commerce. Sensitive data such as credit card numbers and personal identification numbers (PINs) are routinely transmitted in encrypted form. Quantum mechanics is a new tool for both code-breakers and code-makers in their eternal arms race. It has the potential to revolutionize cryptography both by creating perfectly secure codes and by breaking standard encryption schemes. The most well-known application of cryptography is secure communication [1]. Suppose Alice would like to send a message to Bob, but there is an eavesdropper, Eve, who is wiretapping the channel. To prevent Eve from knowing the message, Alice and Bob may perform encryption, i.e., transform the message to something that is not intelligible to Eve during the communication. On receiving the message, Bob inverts the transformation and recovers the message (see figure 1). Bob’s advantage over Eve lies in his knowledge of a secret, commonly called the key, that he shares with Alice. The key tells him how to decode the message. For example: The rumble of Soviet tanks shook the Prague hotel room (number 117) as secret agent John Blond finished decoding his orders from his superior N. He tore the used page from the codebook and immediately burned it with his lighter. Blond is using a perfectly unbreakable cipher, a “one-time pad. ” The secret codebook allows N and Blond to share a long secret binary string — the key —
Alan Turing has certainly contributed to a widespread belief that the quest for a perfect, unbreakable, cipher is a futile pursuit. The ancient art of concealing information has, in the past, been matched by the ingenuity of code-breakers, but no longer! With the advent of quantum cryptography, the hopes of would-be eavesdroppers have been dashed, perhaps for good. Moreover, recent research, building on schemes that were invented decades ago to perform quantum cryptography, shows that secure communication certified by a sufficient violation of a Bell inequality makes a seemingly insane scenario possible-devices of unknown or dubious provenance, even those that are manufactured by our enemies, can be safely used for secure communication, including key distribution. All that is needed to implement this bizarre and powerful form of cryptography is a loophole-free test of a Bell inequality, which is on the cusp of technological feasibility. We provide a brief overview of the intriguing connections between Bell inequalities and cryptography and describe how studies of quantum entanglement and the foundations of quantum theory influence the way we may protect information in the future.