Electronic Eavesdropping Will Be Blocked with Quantum Cryptography
(AsiaTimes) Electronic eavesdropping will become next to impossible in the future, thanks to quantum cryptography.
America’s intelligence community spends nearly $80 billion a year, including $57 billion for the National Intelligence Program and $20 billion for the Military Intelligence Program via signals intelligence (SIGINT), mainly electronic eavesdropping. All of All of that is about to come to an end because of the incipient tech war between China and the United States.
The ultimate form of data security is quantum communications, an application of physics that China has pioneered. Two years ago Chinese scientists had a video call with colleagues in Vienna, creating the signal by entangling atoms halfway around the world. The system that makes the communication possible cannot be stolen, because any outside intervention destroys the signal itself. It is like a letter that disintegrates the instant you set eyes on it.
China’s objective is not to steal the world’s data. Rather, it wants to dominate the construction and future upgrades of the world’s communications infrastructure, linking it to Chinese commercialization (through e-commerce, e-finance and other means), Chinese industrial technology (through the Internet of Things), Chinese finance and Chinese logistics.
Several other research groups besides Huawei are working on quantum cryptographic applications for 5G broadband, including physicists at the University of Bristol, SK Telecom and Toshiba Research. Given that the technology was proven in field tests two years ago, its adoption as a general solution to the problems of cryptography should not take long.