\u201cFinancial firms see this as a differentiator,\u201d says John Prisco, chief executive officer of Quantum Xchange, the company that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Estimates of the annual QKD market range from $50 million to $500 million, but market researcher Global Industry Analysts Inc. says demand for QKD and related technologies may reach $2 billion by 2024. The Chinese government has created a 1,240-mile QKD-protected link between Beijing and Shanghai. It\u2019s also demonstrated the ability to use QKD to transmit and receive messages from a satellite. 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 to secure the communications that help operate power stations. Telecommunications giants including the U.K.\u2019s BT Group Plc and Japan\u2019s NTT Corp. say they\u2019re considering whether to build the protection into their network infrastructure.<\/p>\n
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 by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 showed that the U.S. government, which hoovers up most of the world\u2019s internet traffic, can also break those tougher codes. Exactly how the NSA accomplishes this isn\u2019t 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.)<\/p>\n
Quantum computers are another potential threat to conventional encryption. Like QKD systems, these machines use quantum physics principles to process information and may one day achieve processing power far beyond that of conventional computers. When that happens\u2014in the next 3 to 15 years, depending on whose estimate is right\u2014quantum computers will give almost any user the code-breaking powers of today\u2019s NSA. In 2016 the NSA warned companies that do business with the U.S. government that their next generation of encryption systems would have to be resistant to attacks by quantum computers.<\/p>\n
QKD has limits. It can protect data only in transit, not when it\u2019s at rest, stored in data centers or on hard drives. And because fiber-optic cabling itself absorbs some light, a single photon can travel only so far. Scientists have pushed the boundary ever outward, as far as 260 miles in lab experiments. Yet for high-speed transmissions under real-world conditions, the record is just 60 miles. Farther transmissions require a series of \u201ctrusted nodes,\u201d relays that are themselves vulnerable to hackers or physical tapping. China uses armed guards to secure the nodes in its 1,240-mile QKD network, says Anthony Lawrence, a former NSA network security expert and briefing officer who now runs cybersecurity startup Vor Technology LLC.<\/p>\n
One sure way to avoid these security and distance issues is simply to cut the cord. British startup Kets Quantum Security Ltd. is working with Airbus SE on using QKD to secure communications between a drone and its operator on the ground. And satellite relays will eventually be able to transmit quantum-encrypted signals almost anywhere on Earth, predicts Lawrence, who\u2019s working to commercialize QKD. For the moment, though, the signals are stuck in the Holland Tunnel.<\/p>\n
THE BOTTOM LINE While mass adoption of QKD technology remains a long way off, developers are racing to commercialize it before superpowerful quantum computers become more reliable. \u25cf One estimate puts demand for QKD and related technologies by 2024 as high as $2b<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Commuters inching through rush-hour traffic in the Holland Tunnel between Lower Manhattan and New Jersey don\u2019t 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8781,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18947"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18949,"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18947\/revisions\/18949"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestinsurance.gr\/a1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}