Follow Up: Commerical Quantum Cryptography
from CNET

A 4-year-old start-up has begun shipments of what it says are the world's first commercial data-scrambling devices that use the radically new technology of quantum encryption.

Magiq Technologies, a privately held firm based in New York City, said this week it is selling Navajo Secure Gateway for between $50,000 and $100,000 a unit. It uses a combination of quantum cryptography and traditional cryptography to provide a virtual private network (VPN) running over fiber-optic cable that's designed to be completely secure against all eavesdroppers.
[...]
Quantum cryptography addresses the most worrisome aspect of current public key cryptography, which powers Web browsers, applications like Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), and workhorse protocols like SSH and SSL. For security, those applications rely on the amount of time it takes to factor large numbers used in encryption keys, a task that mathematicians strongly believe is quite difficult but have never managed to prove.

If an eavesdropper such as the National Security Agency, the FBI, or a criminal enterprise ever managed to find a much faster way to factor large numbers, the Internet's current security model would be vulnerable. Magiq's device is designed to solve that theoretical problem by tapping into the weird and counterintuitive laws of quantum physics, which say that it is impossible to eavesdrop on a transmission without disturbing it.
[...]
Quantum theory began at the turn of the last century with scientists who were puzzling over some strange inconsistencies in the real world that classical physics could not explain. Their work in establishing quantum mechanics led to the development of nuclear power, semiconductors, lasers and magnetic resonance imaging. A Scientific American article published in 2000 estimates that almost one-third of the U.S. GDP is "based on inventions made possible by quantum mechanics."

posted by prof_booty | 01:56 PM