Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet for Over Two Years

MIT Technology Review ^ | 5/6/13

[LibWhacker]

A dozen agencies want to snoop into every bit of communication that takes place on the internet, via email, telephones, etc. (I'm surprised the creeps aren't reading our snail mail, and pushing legislators to pass laws that would allow them to implant listening devices in our voice boxes). Another agency invents the means to make that impossible, heeheeheehee. Gooooooood!

[smokingfrog]

I want one.

[Third Person]

Was the sex poodle involved?

[Hardraade]

This is where the messages reach the receiver two weeks before they’re sent, isn’t it?

They need it for the Obamacare bill collection system.

[D-fendr]

I think it will be made illegal - unless the gov can crack it.

[bigheadfred]

im going to bookmark this for later so i know what it is about but in the meantime i can say i positively trust them without a doubt when they say they can make my communications secure i gotta go write some more bad checks now see ya

[FastCoyote]

Wow, this is going into the novel I’m writing.

[apillar]

I'm not surprised, often the government has technology that is 10 years or more ahead of what is available to the public. I remember my dad describing bar-code scanners that the military was using for inventory way back in the late 1960’s, about fifteen years before they started appearing in stores.

[taxcontrol]

If you cant route - it is NOT an Internet. Not even an Intranet.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

Good for honest people and... terrorists.

[Jeff Winston]

That may sound limiting but it still allows each node to send a one-time pad to the hub which it then uses to communicate securely over a classical link. The hub can then route this message to another node using another one time pad that it has set up with this second node. So the entire network is secure, provided that the central hub is also secure.

So... if I understand correctly.

We already knew how to create a perfect, unbreakable cipher. It simply requires knowing the key.

The problem, until now, has been an inability to transmit a perfectly-unbreakable cipher key, in such a way that it could not be intercepted.

This system solves that problem by relying on the principle that quantum information can't be read without being destroyed.

End points generate a key for perfect, unbreakable encryption and transmit it, using quantum information, to the central hub.

Now the central hub shares a common unbreakable key with every end point. Voila. Perfectly secure communication can take place in either direction. And two end points can communicate by going through the hub.

So as long as the hub's secure, all communications is secure.

[Bryan24]

I’m guessing the United States Government would hire a Chinese company to design the security for the hub....

[BlueStateRightist]

I was wondering what Al Gore was doing with his free time and money. That guy is SO smart.

[UCANSEE2]

It is this... with frickin lasers.

[UCANSEE2]

Or... as long as you don’t try to read the encryption key, you can read all the data.

[American in Israel]

If I read the data stream by light leakage off of a fiber with a photodiode, it would not change the quantum data one bit. This is horse pucky.

[Jeff Winston]

Claude Shannon proved, using information theory considerations, that the one-time pad has a property he termed perfect secrecy; that is, the ciphertext C gives absolutely no additional information about the plaintext. This is because, given a truly random key which is used only once, a ciphertext can be translated into any plaintext of the same length, and all are equally likely.

So because the key is perfectly random (and the same length as the message) the only information that is conveyed by having the text is the maximum length of the message.

The completely random key completely randomizes every character of the message. So it doesn't matter if your opponent has all the computing power in the entire universe. Until the key is known, or at least part of it, the message can't be cracked.

The end result is like, "I sent a message to Bob that's 225 characters long. Or maybe less. Maybe I put some filler in just to make it even more inscrutable. So guess what I said?"

[Jeff Winston]

If I read the data stream by light leakage off of a fiber with a photodiode, it would not change the quantum data one bit. This is horse pucky.

Not at the level this stuff operates.

We're talking stuff kind of on the order of individual photons of light type stuff. You read it, it's gone.

[Jeff Winston]

Or at least destroyed.

[rightwingcrazy]

How do you ensure that the central hub is secure?