Quantum cryptography may become available on handheld devices

Hyunchae Chun, Iris Choi, Grahame E. Faulkner +8 more

Mobile devices have become an inseparable part of our everyday life. They are used to transmit an ever-increasing amount of sensitive health, financial and personal information. This exposes us to the growing scale and sophistication of cyber-attacks. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) can provide unconditional and future-proof data security but implementing it for handheld mobile devices comes with specific challenges. To establish security, secret keys of sufficient length need to be transmitted during the time of a handheld transaction (~1s) despite device misalignment, ambient light and user's inevitable hand movements. Transmitters and receivers should ideally be compact and low-cost, while avoiding security loopholes. Here we demonstrate the first QKD transmission from a handheld transmitter with a key-rate large enough to overcome finite key effects. Using dynamic beam-steering, reference-frame-independent encoding and fast indistinguishable pulse generation, we obtain a secret key rate above 30kb/s over a distance of 0.5m.

Morio Toyoshima

Hyunchae Chun, Iris Choi, Grahame E. Faulkner +8 more

Mobile devices have become an inseparable part of our everyday life. They are used to transmit an ever-increasing amount of sensitive health, financial and personal information. This exposes us to the growing scale and sophistication of cyber-attacks. Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) can provide unconditional and future-proof data security but implementing it for handheld mobile devices comes with specific challenges. To establish security, secret keys of sufficient length need to be transmitted during the time of a handheld transaction (~1s) despite device misalignment, ambient light and user's inevitable hand movements. Transmitters and receivers should ideally be compact and low-cost, while avoiding security loopholes. Here we demonstrate the first QKD transmission from a handheld transmitter with a key-rate large enough to overcome finite key effects. Using dynamic beam-steering, reference-frame-independent encoding and fast indistinguishable pulse generation, we obtain a secret key rate above 30kb/s over a distance of 0.5m under ambient light conditions.

Дінмұхамед Әбділдаұлы Түлкібай

In the modern world, one of the most reliable ways to keep all types of communications or information transmitted over computer networks secret is the use of quantum cryptography. The idea of ​​using quantum cryptography to protect information by exploiting the nature of microscopic objects—quantum light (photons), whose behavior is subject only to the laws of physics—has become the most relevant and reliable application. Despite the fact that commercially available quantum cryptography devices are already available, scientific advances in this field are still underway.

Federico Grasselli