Updating quantum cryptography and communications 2016
07-Sep-2017 05:50
In order to avoid all the consequences of extended networks, it is necessary to invest large sums in devices that ensure the viability of QKD over long distances.
In the future, the development and applications of quantum cryptography will allow us to rest assured that our sensitive information in banks, hospitals, or government institutions will not be accessible to any hackers..
Nevertheless, most people’s information is not as sensitive as the information banks, hospitals, and governments manage every day.
Some information needs to remain inaccessible to hackers, like the transaction history of bank accounts, the medical records of all patients or the vote count of an election.
The QKD mechanism continuously generates new keys (in intervals of less than a minute) to encode the message, and data is sent using such keys through the regular communication channel.
Even though QKD has limitations, they are far fewer than those of other encryption systems, and the vulnerabilities can mostly be fixed by modifying the protocol of key generation and communication, but not the principle of QKD itself; that being said we find that the system’s limitations are mostly financial.Although the power of quantum computers is (in theory) potentially enough to break any classic method of encryption, quantum cryptography provides an alternate pathway that has proven to be effective and seems to be turning cost-permissive.