Los Alamos National Labs Has Working Hub-and-Spoke Quantum Network 55
New submitter hutsell writes with this excerpt from MIT's Technology Review: "Richard Hughes and his associates at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico announced today that they have been sending perfectly secure messages with their Quantum Internet that has been in operation for the last two and a half years."
Original paper. Unlike current quantum networks that only allow point-to-point networking, the system at Los Alamos combines traditional and quantum links to route messages through a hub while retaining the security advantages of quantum networking.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
I was semi-joking; but it is actually a serious question. (To the best of my understanding) a quantum-encrypted network provides rock-solid assurance that nobody is physically tapping your lines. Depending on your site, your level of paranoia, and your value as a target, this may be a worthwhile investment compared to classically-encrypted tunnels, or guys with guns keeping people away from your fiber. However, it has no effect whatsoever on the (easier and more common) purely electronic attacks on vulnerable systems. A quantum-encrypted network will just as happily protect packets being sent back home by a keyloggger as it will anything else, and it has no particular ability to detect the evil bit.
This doesn't make it useless; but it's really quite a different animal from classical encryption, or from good system security, and the present state of average system security is so dreadful that it rather overshadows physically tapping lines. If you can get a zero-day for $50k, it starts to become difficult to justify even sending a legitimate contractor out to dig up and splice a bunch of fiber, much less some l33t covert ops fiber modding operation.