Quantum Spy!
Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) has been getting a lot of press. It should, as it's been promising an utterly uncrackable encryption system, the sort of thing Bond would try to get From Russia With Love. An ideal security device guaranteed by the laws of mathematics themselves.
But when someone says "ideal", you should start listening for the "but in reality" (and if you didn't know that, I'm glad that the Daily Galaxy could help fill such critical holes in your education). The Quantum No Cloning theorem seems to assure quantum security - it is absolutely impossible to perfectly copy a quantum state without affecting the original, not as a technical challenge, but as a mathematical fact. You might as well try to build a machine to say 2+2=5. Therefore an eavesdropper can't listen in on a coded message without alerting the eavesdrop's. But who said everything has to be perfect?
This is tactic adopted by Yuta Okuba and colleagues at the University of Tsukuba, where they've designed a quantum eavesdropper. The optical circuit is based on phase-covariant quantum clones, which sound things that would teleport through negaspace to attack the Enterprise rather than codebreakers. The cloner creates copies of the secret data for later examination at the cost of slightly damaging the original.
This 'slight' is what makes it all possible. Any quantum phenomenon is statistical, and all QKD systems have a critical error rate above which either the system didn't work or someone was spying. All our quantum spy has to do is keep the error rate below this detection threshold.
You might think "Why note make the error threshold zero?" For one thing, it would take literally forever to send a message of any length. Quantum is practically the opposite of deterministic - every QKD has protocols for dealing with error for a reason, and if you're going to insist that the only 100% error-free messages are used you'd be faster just waiting for the other person to derive what you wanted to tell them by starting at "The solar system formed five billion years ago...." and working from there.
This development is very, very interesting for all sorts of governmental agencies, and not necessarily in a good way. It seems that the security arms race isn't over after all, but has just entered another phase of innovation and counter-innovation - a battle which may seem pointless, but which provides vital support and funding for those probing the fundamental nature of the universe.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
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