Quantum internet

a.k.a quantum internet...

In the last 24 hours a lot of tech writers, bloggers and me have reported on network-centric quantum communications (NQC), which the bloggers and others have named Quantum Internet. Though the world has woken up to this now and every one wants a piece of it by mad-rush reporting this. Techcrunch.com had reported this in August 2009.

 

A MIT Research paper has been published on NQC. The complete paper can be found here. This paper mentions that a quantum internet capable of sending perfectly secure messages has been running at Los Alamos National Labs for the last two and a half years. Interestingly, ID Quantique, a Geneva, Switzerland based company, has been offering security products based on conventional and quantum technologies to banks, financial institutions and government organizations in Europe.


There has been a rush to report the possibility of more secure Internet using Quantum Mechanics. Most of the articles talk about the advantages such as security, use of the hub and spoke model and existing fiber cable set-up to provide high level of security, using one-time pad etc. Some of the other basic things that we should know about the same are:


1) This model currently uses a hub and spoke method that is a limiting factor. With is model the network can never be more secure than the hub at the middle. Needless to say, with technology moving at a fast pace, this will be over come soon.
2) Your current hardware will not support it. Additional hardware will need to be a part of the devices that we use. This again is a matter of time that our computers, set-top boxes etc. will have this inbuilt. It would be nice to have a software fix to this or the existing hardware should have the ability to provide this with a patch.
3) As technologyreview.com puts it - "These systems have an important limitation, however. The current generation of quantum cryptography systems are point-to-point connections over a single length of fiber, So they can send secure messages from A to B but cannot route this information onwards to C, D, E or F. That’s because the act of routing a message means reading the part of it that indicates where it has to be routed. And this inevitably changes it, at least with conventional routers. This makes a quantum Internet impossible with today’s technology. Various teams are racing to develop quantum routers that will fix this problem by steering quantum messages without destroying them."


Some additional information collated for you from Wikipedia.
"Quantum mechanics (QM – also known as quantum physics, or quantum theory) is a branch of physics which deals with physical phenomena at microscopic scales, where the action is on the order of the Planck constant. Quantum mechanics departs from classical mechanics primarily at the quantum realm of atomic and subatomic length scales. Quantum mechanics provides a mathematical description of much of the dual particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter."

Quantum networks descend from the study of Quantum cryptography. The idea of a quantum network emerged after successful experiments on quantum teleportation. When two companies (one from Switzerland, 'idQuantique', and another from the USA, 'MagiQTech') released practical communication devices based upon the rules of quantum mechanics, the need for a secure network capable of utilizing quantum principles was realized. These networks are now known as quantum communication networks. In these networks, data are communicated as quantum states through the technique of entanglement via an optical fiber link."


One-time pad (OTP), "In cryptography, the one-time pad (OTP) is a type of encryption which has been proven to be impossible to crack if used correctly. Each bit or character from the plaintext is encrypted by a modular addition with a bit or character from a secret random key (or pad) of the same length as the plaintext, resulting in a ciphertext. If the key is truly random, as large as or greater than the plaintext, never reused in whole or part, and kept secret, the ciphertext will be impossible to decrypt or break without knowing the key. It has also been proven that any cipher with the perfect secrecy property must use keys with effectively the same requirements as OTP keys.[3] However, practical problems have prevented one-time pads from being widely used."