Hacky Quantum Hack

My Slashdot RSS feed came up with the story of how an institution had hacked a Quantum cryptography system.

My first thought was, well that is pretty reasonable, you can read a quantum state without any real issue, the problem is Alice and Bob will be aware that you’re reading their conversation. But then this story went on to claim that the hack enabled them read the conversation without the other parties becoming aware. This goes against the entire reason why Quantum cryptography is considered to be perfectly secure, the minute a third party ‘Eve’ measures a Quantum state, the Quantum state becomes destroyed.

How did they do it? Well . . . . they didn’t.

The hack didn’t exploit a flaw in Quantum theory, but rather exploited a flaw in the systems making using of cryptographic technique. It’s an interesting read over at www.nature.com and I was surprised that this type of security was in use today (I believed it was still in its infancy, not ready for prime time quite yet).

Either way, Quantum states, in their weird quirky way, seem to be the way forward for security.