China's Quantum-Key Network, the Largest Ever, Is Officially Online
By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | January 19, 2018 10:56am ET
China has the quantum technology to perfectly encrypt useful signals over distances far vaster than anyone has ever accomplished, spanning Europe and Asia, according to a stunning new research letter.
Bits of information, or signals, pass through people's houses, the skies overhead and the flesh of human bodies every second of every day. They're television signals and radio, as well as private phone calls and data files.
Some of these signals are public, but most are private — encrypted with long strings of numbers known (presumably) only to the senders and receivers. Those keys are powerful enough to keep the secrets of modern society: flirty text messages, bank-account numbers and the passwords to covert databases. But they're brittle. A sufficiently determined person, wielding a sufficiently powerful computer, could break them.
"Historically, every advance in cryptography has been defeated by advances in cracking technology," Jian-Wei Pan, a researcher at the University of Science and Technology of China and author on this research letter, wrote in an email. "Quantum key distribution ends this battle."
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