Commercial quantum cryptography

[f95toli]

Check out this link

http://www.idquantique.com/qkd.html

I should point out that this is not a joke. It is real commercial product. The price is suppose to be of the order $100 000/unit so start saving...

There is also an american company, Magiq Technologies, that will start selling this type of equipment in the summer of 2003 Their product is named Navajo which I think is rather suitable.

 

[Shalmanese]

hmm... 1000 bits/sec eh? Looks ultra-secure porn surfing is still a while away

Then again, if you got 100,000 of them in paralell, you could have a 100Mbit connection. Shame its only a single link. You cant do anything like a LAN with these things because they can't be routed. Has to be an uninteruppted fibre between them.

 

[Mark R]

This isn't meant to be a primary data link - it's meant to be a key transfer link.

All high-throughput encryption is 'symmetrical' - both parties need to know the same key (equivalent to a password).

Public key encryption (very slow) is used to provide security while transferring the main encryption key.

This quantum device, provides an alternate route for transferring encryption keys, offering higher security than simply encrypting them.

 

[grant2]

I wonder if this technology will be useable over leased fiber optics when telecomms convert to optical multiplexing

 

[silverpig]

It probably will be, just not next year.

 

[Shalmanese]

One of the key features of quantum cryptography is that it MOST have only 1 photon per bit. I assume modern fibre optic lines do not currently have the clarity to preserve 1 bit over a useable amount of distance. Modern lines would be able to use repeaters every so often to boost the signal so there would be no incentive make very high quality optic cable.

 

[grant2]

I guess it'll be a very long time before high-quality fiber is cheap enough to have an advantage over repeaters