Interesting People mailing list archives
NEC's quantum telephone
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 08:48:04 -0500
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: NEC's quantum telephone Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 22:39:14 +0900 From: Rod Van Meter <rdv () tera ics keio ac jp> Reply-To: rdv () tera ics keio ac jp To: dave () farber net Dave, [For IP if you wish. I sent this last week about the end of your email troubles, so I'm not sure if it got blotted or if it didn't cross your threshold for "interesting". Up to you, of course, just making sure it got the look.] Chip Elliott and Henry Yeh of BBN were in Tokyo last week, and I helped introduce them to various quantum computing researchers here, while they introduced me to some of the quantum key distribution (QKD) folks they already knew. You can find some of Chip's papers on the DARPA QKDnetwork they run at http://arxiv.org/find/quant-ph/1/au:+Elliott_C/0/1/0/all/0/1
We went to NEC's Tsukuba facility and, among other things, saw a very cool demo: NEC's quantum telephone. More accurately, it's a VoIP phone using QKD-generated keys as a one-time pad for the conversation. I'm a little fuzzy on the total protocol stack, but I don't think they're using full IPSec (unlike the BBN guys), and they said they haven't implemented the authentication for the classical channel yet (which is okay for a demo, as long as you're up front about needing it). I don't think they're planning on productizing the phone, and they are coy about productizing the QKD equipment, though it appears to be very high quality, and they have done a lot of low-level engineering on e.g. frame synchronization to make it work. It is, however, a great demo, and since the final key generation rate is only 13kbps or so over 16km, it's a good bandwidth match if you're doing one-time pad. Chip is a long-time Internet and system security guy, so he is very clear on the value of QKD. That is, he's skeptical. He understands where it fits into the total picture, and also has some ideas about places where *theory* says QKD is secure, but *practice* might break down (for example, the detector that detects a one might be more efficient than the detector that detects a zero; can an eavesdropper exploit that?). All in all, BBN's work is very important, IMHO. I regret to say I didn't get to try it, but I watched Henry and Chip make a quantum-encrypted phone call. I'm sorry to report that it occurred to neither of them to say, "Watson, come here, I need you." It's not much to look at, and the photo's not great, but I took a picture of the quantum telephone and put it on my blog at http://rdvlivefromtokyo.blogspot.com/2005/11/necs-quantum-telephone.html --Rod ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- NEC's quantum telephone David Farber (Nov 22)