The Super-Secure Quantum Cable Hiding in the Holland Tunnel

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff () iconia com>
> Subject: IS: The Super-Secure Quantum Cable Hiding in the Holland Tunnel
> Date: January 15, 2019 3:30:42 JST
> To: Interesting Stuff list <is () iconia com>
>
> EXCERPT:
> Commuters inching through rush-hour traffic in the Holland Tunnel 
> <https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7244413,-74.0070022,3a,73.7y,4.98h,90.86t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sOcNqprL-sL-P9-hOghSZKQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192>
>  between Lower Manhattan and New Jersey don’t know it, but a technology likely to be the future of communication is 
> being tested right outside their car windows. Running through the tunnel is a fiber-optic cable that harnesses the 
> power of quantum mechanics to protect critical banking data from potential spies.
> The cable’s trick is a technology called quantum key distribution, or QKD. Any half-decent intelligence agency can 
> physically tap normal fiber optics and intercept whatever messages the networks are carrying: They bend the cable 
> with a small clamp, then use a specialized piece of hardware to split the beam of light that carries digital ones and 
> zeros through the line. The people communicating have no way of knowing someone is eavesdropping, because they’re 
> still getting their messages without any perceptible delay.
> QKD solves this problem by taking advantage of the quantum physics notion that light—normally thought of as a 
> wave—can also behave like a particle. At each end of the fiber-optic line, QKD systems, which from the outside look 
> like the generic black-box servers you might find in any data center, use lasers to fire data in weak pulses of 
> light, each just a little bigger than a single photon. If any of the pulses’ paths are interrupted and they don’t 
> arrive at the endpoint at the expected nanosecond, the sender and receiver know their communication has been 
> compromised.
> “Financial firms see this as a differentiator,” says John Prisco, chief executive officer of Quantum Xchange, the 
> company that’s been operating the cable in the Holland Tunnel since the fall. Prisco says several large banks and 
> asset management firms are testing his gear, but he declined to name them, citing nondisclosure agreements. The 
> companies are considering using QKD to guard their most sensitive secrets, he says, including trading algorithms and 
> customer settlement accounts. Quantum Xchange, based in Bethesda, Md., says it hopes to stretch its cables from 
> Boston to Washington, D.C., and is also promoting them to U.S. government agencies.
> Estimates of the annual QKD market range from $50 million to $500 million, but market researcher Global Industry 
> Analysts Inc. says demand for QKD 
> <https://www.strategyr.com/market-report-quantum-cryptography-forecasts-global-industry-analysts-inc.asp> and related 
> technologies may reach $2 billion by 2024. The Chinese government has created a 1,240-mile QKD-protected link 
> <https://www.ft.com/content/899458ca-655c-11e7-8526-7b38dcaef614> between Beijing and Shanghai. It’s also 
> demonstrated the ability to use QKD to transmit and receive messages from a satellite 
> <http://english.cas.cn/newsroom/news/201709/t20170928_183577.shtml>. And a half-dozen QKD startups are pitching other 
> kinds of clients. Qubitekk Inc., a startup in Southern California, has a U.S. Department of Energy contract for a 
> pilot project 
> <https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/qubitekk-to-receive-federal-funding-to-help-protect-nations-power-grid-from-cyber-attack-272714421.html>
>  to secure the communications that help operate power stations. Telecommunications giants including the U.K.’s BT 
> Group Plc and Japan’s NTT Corp. say they’re considering whether to build the protection into their network 
> infrastructure.
> Why bother when most network traffic is already encrypted? Encryption is worthless if an attacker manages to get the 
> digital keys used to encode and decode messages. Each key is usually extra-encrypted, but documents disclosed 
> <https://www.cjfe.org/snowden> by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 showed that the 
> U.S. government, which hoovers up most of the world’s internet traffic, can also break those tougher codes. Exactly 
> how the NSA accomplishes this isn’t widely known. (One suspicion is that while keys are supposed to be based on 
> multiplying two random large prime numbers together, many systems use a relatively small subset of primes, making it 
> much easier for a computer to guess the key.)...
> [...]
> https://www.bloombergquint.com/businessweek/the-super-secure-quantum-cable-hiding-in-the-holland-tunnel 
> <https://www.bloombergquint.com/businessweek/the-super-secure-quantum-cable-hiding-in-the-holland-tunnel>
>
> -- 
> Geoff.Goodfellow () iconia com <mailto:Geoff.Goodfellow () iconia com>
> living as The Truth is True
> http://geoff.livejournal.com <http://geoff.livejournal.com/>  




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