You just wrinkled my brain.

Off-the-shelf quantum communication systems have been available for a number of years. I've seen them marketed to companies which have multiple buildings and want the data sent between the buildings to be secure.

This system sounds interesting since it would use the quantum channel only for a key exchange and then the normal network for encrypted data. Certainly sounds like an interesting idea for an intranet, but it isn't clear whether it would scale to the networks most of us outside of a corporate environment.

@2 It says this in the article, but you're limited to two locations. "Various teams are racing to develop quantum routers that will fix this problem by steering quantum messages without destroying them."

And that's what LANL seems to have done.

It does seem like it's solved a very, very limited set of problems. What I'm waiting for is real quantum computing.

Hope WIll chimes in to explain for us what this "actually" means.

@2 "Off-the-shelf quantum communication systems have been available for a number of years. I've seen them marketed to companies which have multiple buildings and want the data sent between the buildings to be secure."

What vendors? Link please!

@4 - FTW

@5 Will actually developed quantum computing during the Battle of Khe Sanh.

@5: I really want someone to collect all of the comments Will has made about what he knows/does so we can piece together the myriad lies into one impossible Ubermensch.

He said something yesterday about seeing combat duty somehwere or something, avoiding bullets. I liked that one a lot.

I get that reference, Paul. Well done!

@8 why would I help you?

Anything over 256 encoding is fairly secure, but all your information is being stored anyway, and easily accessed without warrants. They pop a copy of the US stream offshore and run it on machines there, to make it "ok" to read your stuff.

Just use one of the open source variants and sign up for google's 1000 Gbps service you denizens of the Hill and the U Dist get while we all freeze in the dark.

Mind you, you'll all use easily guessed passwords anyway, so that's a total waste of time. And save the password file on a computer we can use.

Man, I did that before I could talk? Cool!

Besides, it was Emperor Ferdinand, not Fidel.

This isn't a "Big Deal" to the internet as a whole, and it's a fairly substantial improvement to an already existing technology. As @2 points out, there are off the shelf solutions today. This development is neat because it allows networks of computers to perform secure key exchanges in a more more affordable and practical way.

All this still only applies to internal LANs or relatively short distances outside your building.

The Holy Grail for cryptography is something as secure as a one way pad, but magically being able to already have the key pads in both peer locations without exposing them during transport. The key length is the same as the message length, so you need to somehow securely exchange your entire message length's worth of perfectly random key data. Quantum key exchange can do this. If only it were possible to do this across the world..

@8, I think I love you.

@6: http://nucrypt.net/automated-entanglemen…

@14, my impression is that it's only limited by what you can do through a single-mode fiber. The limit I've seen quoted is 40km (though I've used regular (non-quantum) fiber links that did 100km over a single-mode fiber).