Imagine waking up one morning and hearing the internet has effectively been hacked. Not just one website, or one company, or even one government that’s suddenly vulnerable: it's everything. 🖋️ By robhastings
QKD relies on quantum mechanics to detect if anyone is spying on a message you’re sending. “If someone intercepts it and has a cheeky look, you can find out that they’ve done that, because they can’t avoid disturbing the quantum signals,” explains Spiller. “That disturbance is built into nature, it’s not something that people can get around in the future… They will never be able to overcome that.
But there are major downsides to QKD. It still relies on some form of cryptography, which could still be cracked. It can detect an eavesdropper but it can’t stop them. Plus, it “will require substantial new hardware to be installed everywhere,” admits Spiller. “That’s going to be a lot of work and cost a lot of money.” He and his team are trying to create QKD networks that don’t need new bits of machinery, but he admits this idea remains far from realisation.
In all, 82 were submitted. By last year, just a handful were left. Even at this stage, however, some contenders turned out to be flawed. One entry, SIKE, wasin a single hour by a conventional computer. But a US-developed algorithm, “Kyber”, has now been approved for use by NIST. Arqit, located in London, has been pursuing its own ideas. Its chief cryptographer, Daniel Shiu, who worked at GCHQ for 20 years, is wary of trying to solve the quantum problem with more algorithms given that some of the most promising ones “have failed catastrophically” in the NIST process.
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