The secretive Los Alamos National Laboratory claims it cracked the secret behind running quantum networks-- and doing it so successfully it has had a flexible quantum network running for 2.5 years.
Described as the secret sauce behind the ultimate in cryptography, quantum networking relies on the theory stating that the act of observing a quantum object (such as a photon) changes the object in question. This makes potential hackers detectable, and any cryptographic keys unusable.
The idea is hardly new. Commercial quantum cryptographic systems are already available from firms such as ID Quantique and MagiQ. However such systems can only send messages from A to B over a single cable, since the routing a message to locations C, D, or E involves some reading of the message, therefore changing it.
However the Los Alamos National Labs team has an alternative solution, one supposedly both easier and cheaper to implement-- network-centric quantum communications (NQC). Using a hub-and spoke approach, a central hub (dubbed "Trent") decodes an incoming message, transmits it to a new spoke, re-encodes it and fires it off. Read more...