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The use of quantum mechanics to encrypt messages may foil eavesdroppers and codebreakers for good AT THE speed of light, Hephaestuss sacred fire/ Blazed from beacon tower to beacon tower. Thus, according to Aeschylus, spoke Clytemnestra, an ancient queen of Mycenae, explaining how she received tidings that her husband Agamemnon was on his way home from the Trojan war. Perhaps Agamemnon would have done better to have turned up unannounced. The news left the queen and her lover just enough time to plot the cuckolds assassination. When Agamemnon sent the message, though, he probably worried less about betrayal than interception. Using signal fires or flashes of sunlight reflected from a mirror was (and is) a cheap and simple way to broadcast information. But although such signals were used until the early 20th century to co-ordinate military maneuvers, they are vulnerable to espionage: a clever onlooker can easily observe the flashes of light and crack the message, even if it is encoded. It may seem surprising, therefore, that some physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico believe that they can transmit messages through the open air in complete secrecy, by exploiting the quantum-mechanical properties of light. In June 2001, at the International Conference on Quantum Information, in Rochester, New York, they explained how to build a system that will broadcast un-crackable messages via satellite.
All keyed up
Modern cryptography, such as that employed in a widely used program, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), relies on the mathematical manipulation of data. To encrypt, or lock, a message, the program performs a series of mathematical steps on it, using a number more than a hundred digits long. Only that numbers correct mate, or key, is able to undo these steps and unpack the message. The size of these numbers, and the mathematical formula that links them, make it, in effect, impossible to work out the key by computational brute force. One of todays keys could not be calculated even if all of todays computers worked for the lifespan of the universe on the task. Surely that is safety enough? Perhaps not (that is why the software is called pretty good and not perfect). Future advances in computing may be enough to overwhelm the defences of PGPand its kind. More prosaically, a thief who stole a key could impersonate its careless ownerand nobody would ever know the difference. Richard Hughes, the leader of the team at Los Alamos, thinks that using photons (the particles, or quanta, of the quantum theory of light) to manufacture and distribute keys would correct these weaknesses. Individual photons possess properties that are governed by one of the basic laws of quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle. A photons polarization, for example, can be measured against any of three yardsticks: the horizontal axis, the diagonal axis, and the circular axis. However, the more that is known about one of these, the less can be known about the others. In other words, if an exact measurement is taken of a photons horizontal polarization, nothing at all can be known about its polarisation on the diagonal or circular axes. Take the same measurement twice, and the answer will remain the same; but take one and then another, and the first answer becomes worthless.