Advance opens door for secure quantum applications without specialized infrastructure
#Hey Kids! Guess which word is getting shoehorned into EVERY technology discussion in 2025 until it becomes meaningless?
So theyâve shown they can send light over a cable designed to transfer light.
The impressive thing is of course managing to get one specific photon to one specific location. Still, what benefits does that have over the standard encoding?
I guess this technique might have a lower error rate and higher distance, because itâs binary by nature with no quantization needed. But you donât need the quantum entanglement part at all for this.
Edit: Reading is hard! This is indeed exciting for security. I wonder how it fairs against a very powerful MitM though.
Itâs physically impossible to intercept an entangled photon without disrupting the entanglement. The act of observing the photon collapses the quantum uncertainty of itâs state, so even the most sophisticated MitM attempt is going to immediately break the link.
But can you detect the link being broken by someone other than your intended communication partner?
If A sends a particle to B, couldnât M intercept Aâs particle and send a different particle to B? Kind of like intercepting Diffie Hellman. A and B will both share some information with M, but not with each other.
Only limited by the speed of light,
What exactly do you think the normal ip data is limited by on the same optical cable?
I thought we were talking about quantum entaglement and spooky action at a distance, which is famously not limited by the speed of light?
Am I missing something obvious?
Yes, quantum entanglement occurs without the speed of light, but we famously cannot interpret information from it faster than the speed of light - it isnât FTL communication.
If I understand it right, this could enable real time connectivity between client and server.
Nope, quantum entanglement canât enable FTL communication. âReal timeâ still involves lightspeed lag.
What it does is allows random bits of information to be transmitted in an entangled state. You send an entangled pair of photons, and find out afterwards who got a 1 or a 0 when the photons are observed at either end. They call it âquantum teleportationâ because both ends know what the other got, and the information about who got what canât be intercepted without disrupting the enganglement.
Once they can figure out how to preserve that uncertainty through repeaters, switches, and routers, then we can have a quantum internet that uses encryption based on shared quantum random numbers. Itâs likely to be necessary soon since quantum computers might only be a few years from breaking current common encryption techniques.
The article starts by doing the âquantumâ thing that really irks me, where they use confusing terminology to make it sound like âFTL communicationâ without actually saying it. This is garbage that doesnât actually matter to the article.
Basically, they found a way to send quantum entangled photons (which exist in a very delicate unobserved state) through existing fiber optic infrastructure without interfering with the standard internet information already travelling through the fiber. A lot of the difficulty with this is due to signal noise that needs to be filtered out. This will be useful communicating quantum measurements over long distances.
It should be a legal requirement to link the actual research paper at the top of science articles
They then go on to describe what sounds like
-
transmitting a single specific photon through âthe internetâ, implying start-to-finish with routing (not possible without special infrastructure)
-
Use that photon to then send information instantly by manipulating its entangled sibling (also not possible)
So yeah this article is a crock of shit.
