has anyone seen this article about "entanglement encryption"?
http:/
"Gisin is a Swiss quantum physicist and a pioneer in the exploration and manipulation of the very small -- that is, the various "quanta" of the micro world, things like individual atoms and photons. (Photons are the elementary particle of light.) In 2001, Gisin co-founded a company called ID Quantique with the aim of converting the strange phenomena found in the quantum world into commercial applications. At that time, the quantum world was still very much a theoretical place, one more suited for the laboratory than employed for practical application. But over the last decade quantum technologies have matured such that they can offer many practical benefits, including the kind of data encryption that ID Quantique now provides to various banks and governments -- data security that is virtually impossible to breach.
"It sounds like there's some quantum magic in this new technology, but of course it's not magic, it's just very modern science," Gisin says. But next to classical communication and encryption methods, it might as well be magic. Classical cryptography generally relies on algorithms to randomly generate encryption and decryption keys enabling the sender to essentially scramble a message and a receiver to unscramble it at the other end. If a third-party (known as an "adversary" in data security lingo) obtains a copy of the key, that person can make a copy of the transmission and decipher it, or -- with enough time and computing power -- use powerful algorithms to break the decryption key. (This is what the NSA and other agencies around the world are allegedly up to.) But Gisin's quantum magic taps some of the stranger known phenomena of the quantum world to transmit encryption keys that cannot be copied, stolen, or broken without rendering the key useless.
The primary quantum tool at work in ID Quantique's quantum communication scheme is known as "entanglement," a phenomena in which two particles -- in this case individual photons -- are placed in a correlated state. Under the rules of quantum mechanics, these two entangled photons are inextricably linked; a change to the state of one photon will affect the state of the other, regardless of whether they are right next to each other, in different rooms, or on opposite sides of the planet. One of these entangled photons is sent from sender to receiver, so each possesses a photon. These photons are not encoded with any useful information -- that information is encoded using normal classical encryption methods -- but with a decryption key created by a random number generator. (True random number generators represent another technology enabled by quantum physics -- more on that in a moment.)
Any adversary would have to place herself in between sender and receiver at just the right moment in order to intercept this key-encoded photon, but even that would not enable her to steal any useful information. Thanks to the laws of quantum mechanics, any tampering with the photon in transit would change the state of the entangled photon still in the sender's possession, raising a red flag. The sender could then simply discard the intercepted key and generate another.
The idea of quantum cryptography is not new, but its deployment in real-world, non-laboratory environments is something that is just now getting underway. ID Quantique's client roster includes several governments and financial institutions whose names it is not at liberty to disclose. It also has found a market among online gaming sites who rely on ID Quantique's quantum-based random number generators to ensure their platforms cannot be gamed by other computer programs. (Computer algorithm-based random number generators, though sophisticated, are not considered truly random in the way that a roulette wheel is considered truly random -- by their nature they will produce patterns that other computer programs can detect.) The company is among the first to move forward with the commercialization of next-generation quantum technologies derived from what physicists refer to generally as quantum physics' "second revolution." The first happened decades ago with the advent of lasers and the like, which deal with the manipulation of multiple quanta rather than individual quanta. But it certainly won't be the last."
this wont really change much in the security world other than make current standards of sending of data safer during transport but the start and end point are still vulnerable..but still its pretty cool that they can use photons as a form of key.
sorry text wall and i dont trust myself to tl:dr it in a way that represents the actual info here...
edit: name change, i am unclear why this has russian in the title for cnn the company id quantique is in Switzerland i think..