Published in Physics World, 20 May 2010
It is supposed to be absolutely secure – a means to transmit secret information between two parties with no possibility of someone eavesdropping.
Yet quantum cryptography, according to some engineers, is not without its faults. In a preprint submitted late last week to arXiv, Hoi-Kwong Lo and colleagues at the University of Toronto, Canada, claim to have hacked into a commercial quantum cryptography system by exploiting a certain practical “loophole”. So does this mean high-profile users of quantum cryptography – banks and governments, for example – are in danger of being eavesdropped after all? […]
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