Quantum Cryptography Ready For Wide Adoption?

An anonymous reader points us to an interview with the founder of quantum cryptography pioneer MagiQ Technologies. From the article: "Q: When do you think we'll see service providers offer quantum cryptography services to their end-customers? A: This will happen within one year and we'll see fairly wide adoption within the next three years. We are working with big carriers such as Verizon and AT&T as well as some companies that own fiber networks. The goal is to embed quantum cryptography into the technology infrastructure so it becomes totally transparent to the end-user..." The cost of a pair of MagiQ boxes to implement point-to-point encryption on a 120-km link is $100,000 plus service.

Re:Totally useless

[Chirs]

The benefit of quantum cryptography is in secure key exchange. With regular systems you don't know if someone is sniffing the packets going through your fiber.

With quantum key exchange, the very act of diverting a photon to "sniff" it disturbs the signal enough that the far end can detect it.

Once you've exchanged keys (at a low bit-rate) you then use standard encryption techniques to exchange the actual data.

Re:Totally useless

[jomama717]

I was about to post the same thing after reading this [magiqtech.com] from the "MagiQ" website, linked from the article. The paragraph entitled "Quantum Cryptography" is very informative, assuming it is accurate.

Troll is almost entirely incorrect

[billstewart]

Quantum Cryptography is established real technology. It's not particularly *useful*, but it's real.

You won't have gaping security holes in the last mile if you buy this stuff - it's designed to work on end-to-end dark fiber. You'll still need crypto for other reasons, and you'll still have gaping holes inside your wiring closets, but last mile won't be a problem. The range of the system is 120km, so if you're trying to connect buildings together that are farther apart than that, you do have a physical security problem you'll need to manage at your repeater locations.

This won't increase your phone bills unless you buy it. It's not a system designed for carriers to put in their network backbones - it's designed for an end-user customer to buy dark fiber service between a pair of buildings and put these boxes on the ends. The carriers generally charge a pile of money for that kind of service, and the more people buying it, the better their economies of scale, so if you're a consumer who's not buying this, that's slightly positive for you.

The carriers won't need to pay them with quantum money - the end customers will need to pay in real money...

SSL is quite breakable

[ab762]

as it relies only on being intractable. Throw enough (quantum) resources at it, and it is directly breakable. The fact that on average it takes CPU-centuries is irrelevant to "unbreakable".

Re:SNAKE OIL!

[Mr. Firewall]

...if you can get physical access to the line you can bend it and with the right equipment read all the data off the line without any interruption of the normal service.

Nope. Not with quantum crypto. First, you can't read the data because it destroys the data. Second, it will DEFINITELY interrupt the normal service! (because you've destroyed the data)

There are videos of this being done, where they capture a broadcast on a fiber wire and there is no noticeable difference on the original signal.

You're thinking ordinary fiber-optics. Quantum is a whole different world.