I spent the morning at the Waterloo, Ontario Institute for Quantum Computing, one of the world’s top quantum computing and nanotechnology labs. In a brand-new 235,000 square foot, $160 million dollar facility that, inside, looks like the starship Enterprise, I met Alice and Bob.

They weren’t very talkative, of course — they’re computers.

“In quantum cryptography, you’re sending information from A to B … we call A ‘Alice’ and B ‘Bob,’” says Martin LaForest, PhD and a senior manager at IQC. “The eavesdropper, naturally, is Eve.”

Source: John Koetsier

“Bob” receives quantum communications

One part of the vast facility is given over to Vadim — last name not given — who hacks commercially-available quantum communications devices like these two from ID Quantique for fun and profit. The fun is the success, and the profit is that ID Quantique lets him keep Alice and Bob, and even sends him more machines — as do other quantum cryptography companies.

“He’s sort of offering a service to the community,” LaForest says. “If you think you have a good quantum key distribution system, give it to me … and I’ll give it my best shot. And so far, he’s very good.”

Modern cryptography is based on our inability to quickly solve challenging mathematical problems, such as the factoring of very large primes. Theoretically almost any security solution available is hackable over time, but realistically you might need months, years, or even decades to crack some of the top 128-bit and 256-bit encryption algorithms available today.

That’s not possible with quantum cryptography.

“If you want to crack quantum communication, you have to do it in real time,” says LaForest. “When you try to observe it, you perturb it … and you can’t copy it because copying is the same thing, give or take, as looking and copying.”

LaForest is referencing the physicist Schrodinger’s cat example. As Schrodinger famously said, you cannot definitely know much about a quantum state, because the act of observing the state changes it. He illustrated that point with a cat in a box which has a 50/50 chance of dying based on the decay of one radioactive particle: a quantum phenomenon. You cannot check whether the cat is alive or dead, because checking changes reality, and so the cat exists in an indeterminate state, neither alive nor dead.

Source: John Koetsier

Alice is the starting point for quantum communication

And yet, it is still possible to hack quantum cryptography, as Vadim demonstrates every month or so.

Alice and Bob communicate via connected photons — particles of light that have been “entangled” in a process even Einstein called spooky — and that communication can’t be intercepted without the intended recipient knowing about it.

But once the message has been received, it’s another matter.

“Vadim is trying to find the implementation flaws,” LaForest told me. “This is one of the challenges right now — the protocol is secure … but its physical implementation might not be. You can have faulty detectors, or you can play tricks with the electronics.”

Which makes the work of Eve — or Vadim — very challenging indeed.

But that work, LaForest says, does not go unrewarded by commercial users of quantum encryption systems:

“It’s important to note: The commercially available boxes are secure. Most of the time, Vadim finds the problems in what they call the research system, and in the commercial system, those bugs are already fixed.”

While NASA is busy extending the Internet to outer space by increasing fault-tolerance and caching for packets traveling long distances over long periods of time, Chinese scientists are helping invent something that could make communication between Mars and Earth even more reliable. Or help create the next generation of quantum computers.

I’m talking about data teleportation. Data has been teleported before — as far as 89 miles —  but never between two large, physically visible objects.

So the scientists at Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences in Anhui, China entangled photonic quantum bits in a quantum memory node, sent one of the entangled particles  to another quantum memory node via an optical cable, made changes to the spinwave state of the nearby photon, and observed the same changes happening in the remote photo.

If you understand this, you’re a genius. Stop reading immediately and create a Star Trek-style matter teleporter, charge the world royalties, and retire as the richest human in the history of the world.

The stupid translation — meaning one I can understand — is that some super-smart geeks mysteriously connected two tiny particles so that they want to be twins but cruelly separated them. They then made changes to Mike (the nearest one) and observed equivalent changes automatically happening in Ike (the farthest one).

What’s this good for?

The upshot is that scientists can read data that has been received without, apparently, having been sent. Without, that is, having been sent by any physical means that we currently understand: no radio waves, no light messages, no audible communication, and yes, no smoke signals.

Which means that if the distance over which this occurs can be increased, and if you can reliably transport half of your entangled quantum bits and bites to Mars, Jupiter, or Alpha Centauri … you’ve got an awesome interplanetary Internet that’s reliable even if there’s a solar flare filling local space with charged particles and drowning out radio waves. Or, you’ve got the makings of a quantum computer that can have parts in Washington, Beijing, and Valles Marineris, the Martian Grand Canyon.

Unfortunately, however, you do not get instantaneous transmission. You still have to wait the 15 or so minutes it takes for light to travel between Earth and Mars, depending on where the two planets are lining up.

Because sadly, although teleportation is cool and spooky and amazingly high-tech and doesn’t travel by light, it does obey Einstein’s laws of physics and will not move faster than light.

Seems odd, doesn’t it, that such a crazy metaphysical technology feels bound by that cosmic speed limit?

photo credit: - Dave Morrow - via photopin cc; hat tip: ExtremeTech