Using Light To Encrypt Communications
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Researchers of the UT[*] found a new way to protect data from attacks with quantum computers. As they published today in New Journal of Physics. With quantum computers on the rise, we can no longer exclude the possibility that a quantum computer will become so powerful it can break existing cryptography. Single particles of light are already being used to protect data but the transmission of one bit per photon is slow. Pepijn Pinkse led the experiment to increase the transmission speed up to seven bits per photon.
[...] Standard QKD [(Quantum Key Distribution)] systems use single particles of light-photons-that are in one of two possible states, for instance horizontally or vertically polarized. This limits the transmission to one bit per photon. In a sense, the photons are encoded in an alphabet of just two letters: a and b.
Researchers from the UT now increased this number with more than a thousand letters. This increases the resistance against noise and potentially increases the data rate. They achieved this by encoding the quantum information in 1024 possible locations of the used photons. To make it hard for an attacker to see what was sent, they randomly switch the encoding between two different alphabets.
[...] Employing this technique together with very weak light, a video projector chip and modern single-photon detecting camera, the researchers demonstrated that they could transmit up to seven secure bits per quantum key distribution using spatially encoded light."
[*] UT - University of Twente, The Netherlands.More information: T B H Tentrup et al. Large-alphabet quantum key distribution using spatially encoded light, New Journal of Physics (2019). DOI: 10.1088/1367-2630/ab5cbe
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