https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612327/europes-quest-for-an-unhackable-quantum-internet/
By Martin Giles
MIT Technology Review
October 22, 2018
The fast train from Paris to Rotterdam was an hour late leaving the Gare
du Nord. When it finally deposited me in the Dutch city, I discovered that
the onward train to Delft had been suspended because of maintenance work
on the tracks. It two took circuitous bus journeys and a taxi ride before
I finally made it to my destination.
Given that I was there to learn about the future of communications, this
seemed appropriate. My trip was a reminder that while shipping people from
place to place is still fraught with unforeseen glitches, gargantuan
amounts of data flow smoothly and swiftly all day, every day through the
fiber-optic cables connecting cities, countries, and entire continents.
And yet these data networks have a weakness: they can be hacked. Among the
secret documents leaked a few years ago by US National Security Agency
contractor Edward Snowden were ones showing that Western intelligence
agencies had managed to tap into communication cables and spy on the vast
amounts of traffic flowing through them.
The research institute I was visiting in Delft, QuTech, is working on a
system that could make this kind of surveillance impossible. The idea is
to harness quantum mechanics to create a flawlessly secure communications
network between Delft and three other cities in the Netherlands by the end
of 2020 (see map below for the planned links).
The QuTech researchers, led by Stephanie Wehner and Ronald Hanson, still
face a number of daunting technical challenges. But if they succeed, their
project could catalyze a future quantum internet—in much the same way that
Arpanet, which the US Department of Defense created in the late 1960s,
inspired the creation of the internet as we know it today.
[...]
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