“Decoys fix quantum key swapping”

Posted by William Heath in Murphy's Law, cracking stuff at February 22nd, 2007

The BBC reports…

Laser light, Eyewire

The technique uses photons of light as decoys

British scientists have found a way to fix a vulnerability in quantum cryptographic systems.

If left unpatched the flaw would make it possible to grab information about the keys used to scramble information without being detected.

The flaw emerges because of the way that laser diodes emit the photons of light used to carry quantum key data.

Using decoy photons the researchers can spot when attackers are eavesdropping on secure communication channels.

There are no comments yet.

Leave a Reply

Contributors to the Blindside wiki and blog should note their input forms part of a collaborative resource that is Creative Commons (by-sa 2.5) licensed. We hope these resources will be reused and remixed in the public interest. You do not need to seek permission before you re-use our works, although we do require that users attribute Blindside as their source, and license the resulting work under the same terms.