3 ms·
The basic idea is that the communication channel key changes very frequently (EDIT: see praseodym's response below). The QKD network itself is basically just a
by leetbulb 8y ago
The basic idea is that the communication channel key changes very frequently (EDIT: see praseodym's response below). The QKD network itself is basically just a stream of keys. An active attack would require compromise of many keys. If your error rate goes above some threshold (even for re-transmissions of a single message), you know the QKD channel is being tampered with.
Take the whisper protocol for example... instead of having a synchronized state machine that determines shared message keys between both parties, those keys may instead come from an external QKD stream.
- praseodym 8y agoTo add to that: a QKD with one-time pad[1] is proven secure. However, because many QKD implementations have low secret key rates (the highest in research is 10Mbps[2]; most commercial implementations do only a few Kbps) you won’t be doing high-bandwidth communication using that method. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad [2] https://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2017_09/pr1501.htm https://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2017_09/pr1501.htm
- leetbulb 8y agoThe author of OP article really needs to read that Toshiba press release. Good layman explanation. Also, I figured that the bottleneck came from the amount of entangled photons that could be generated. Interesting to know that it's a hardware/software issue on the detector and post-processing side.