Anyone who sends an email or bids on eBay with a niggling fear about privacy may soon be able to relax. Programmers have made a major breakthrough in their quest for a totally secure computer network by turning to Star Trek-style physics that would bamboozle the sharpest hacker.
Quantum cryptography is the ultimate example of small-is-beautiful technology: information is encoded at the subatomic level on individual photons, the smallest known units of light. They can then be sent on optical fibre networks from one computer to another. To snoop on such messages undetected, a hacker would have to defy the laws of quantum mechanics.
'Any attempt by the hacker to read the message causes errors that show up. This results from a proven law of nature,' said Dr Andrew Shields, leader of Toshiba Research Europe's quantum information group.
Previous experiments with quantum cryptography foundered because photons are so sensitive to fluctuations in the hardware that the tiniest change in temperature or movement of the fibre wrecked the process.
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