Posted on 05/15/2005 1:31:34 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Australian scientists believe they have developed an unbreakable information code to stop hackers, using a diamond, a kitchen microwave oven and an optical fibre.
Researchers at Melbourne University used the microwave to "fuse" a tiny diamond, just 1/1000th of a millimetre, onto an optical fibre, which could be used to create a single photon beam of light which they say cannot be hacked.
Photons are the smallest known particles of light. Until now, scientists could not produce a single-photon beam, thereby narrowing down the stream of light used to transmit information.
"When it comes to cryptology, it's not so much of a problem to have a coded message intercepted, the problem is getting the key (to decode it)," said university research fellow James Rabeau, who developed the diamond device.
"The single-photon beam makes for an unstealable key."
The security of information depends on the properties of light that is used to transmit data. Laser beams which are used at the moment send billions of photons, making it easy for hackers to steal some of them and break the code, said Rabeau.
The diamond device sends a stream of single photons, so that if the chain of communication is broken, the information becomes corrupted and a hacker immediately exposed to both the sender and the receiver, he said.
Only diamonds are known to create stable single-photon beams at room temperature.
Rabeau and his team have received a $2.5 million innovation grant from the Victoria state government to develop a prototype and commercialise the technology.
I give it a week until it's hacked.
Tomorrow's Slashdot: "Hackers break unbreakable single-photon-beam code"
Yeah, but HOW FAR? I know we encrypt and success is tied to beam length.
It's not "unhackable."
By transmitting each bit as a single photon, it's impossible for there to be more than one recipient. So either the intended recipient receives each photon, or the hacker does. However, if the intended recipient doesn't get the photon he's expecting, he knows something's wrong.
Well the hacker could still sniff out the photons and forward them on.
Yes, but not without introducing a measurable delay.
If hackers could crack UMD, they can hijack this.
Discovered this while they were making dehydrated water right ?
Also, if quantum entanglement is used, intercepted photons would be obvious even in the abscence of any retransmission delay.
I'm guessing that this is a very poor description of one part of a quantum encryption system. Unless there's some other way to detect a listener on a single-photon fibre that didn't work on a multi-photon fibre ... known latency between Alice and Bob, so forcing Eve to retransmit each photon increases the latency and gives her away, perhaps.
So how many "hacks" today are made by intercepting an encrypted data stream? I thought it was mostly done through social engineering, use of passwords obtained in mundane ways, compromising OS's and outright theft of the data storage devices themselves.
Codes are made to be broken.
It sounds like the security is based on the fact that different diamonds produce photons with different properties and that there is no known way of manipulating photons to "look" a certain way. So without the exact same diamond the hacker is unable to replicate the recieved photon.
This provides physical layer security in that the recieving device can be assured that a packet originated from a trusted device and has not been intercepted.
Seems quite secure to me, as to crack it depends on a big advance in physics (as far as I know), so it is extremely doubtful any backroom hackers can figure this one out.
Quite a hassle to set up a network to use it though, so I guess its just for those ultra-secure networks.
"Tomorrow's Slashdot: "Hackers break unbreakable single-photon-beam code" Or, hackers steal diamond.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
I found this little bit of information on entwining.
When a photon (usually polarized laser light) passes through matter, it will be absorbed by an electron. Eventually, and spontaneously, the electron will return to its ground state by emitting the photon. Certain crystal structures increase the likelihood that the photon will decay into two photons upon emission, both of them with longer wavelengths than the original. Keep in mind that a longer wavelength means a lower frequency, and thus less energy. The total energy of the two photons must equal the energy of the photon originally fired from the laser (conservation of energy).
When the original photon decays into two photons, the resulting photon pair is considered entangled.
Normally the photons exit the crystal such that one is aligned in a horizontally (H) polarized light cone, the other aligned vertically (V). By adjusting the experiment, the horizontal and vertical light cones can be made to overlap. Even though the polarization of the individual photons is unknown, the nature of quantum mechanics demands they differ.
To illustrate, if an entangled photon meets a vertical polarizing filter (analagous to the fence in Figure 4.4), the photon may or may not pass through. If it does, then its entangled partner will not because the instant that the first photon's polarization is known, the second photon's polarization will be the exact opposite.
It is this instant communication between the entangled photons to indicate each other's polarization that lies at the very heart of quantum entanglement. This is the "spooky action at a distance" that Einstein believed was theoretically implausible.
-"...using a diamond, a kitchen microwave oven and an optical fibre."-
Why do I feel like reading Dave Barry right now?
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