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Feb. 19, 2004 — Quantum cryptography, which harnesses the curious physics of individual photons, puts the unique power of the nanoscale to work. Two small companies, New York-based MagiQ Technologies Inc. and id Quantique SA in Geneva are among the first firms to commercialize products that utilize quantum encryption. The approach is designed to make data sent over optical fiber virtually impossible to decode.
MagiQ began selling its Navajo systems, which ranges in price from around $50,000 to more than $100,000, in late 2003. Id Quantique, a 2001 spinout from the University of Geneva, offers similarly priced technology for the European market.
Potential customers include financial, government and military institutions, along with telecommunications firms — any industry where it’s critical that transmission of information is secure.
Meanwhile, the corporate research labs of established players including Toshiba Research Europe, NEC Labs and IBM are also investigating the field. Andrew Shields, who leads Toshiba’s effort, reported that his team in Cambridge, England, recently sent a quantum-encrypted signal a record 122 kilometers.
The origins of quantum cryptography stretch back significantly further, more than 20 years. In 1984, IBM’s Charles Bennett and fellow physicist Gilles Brassard at the University of Montreal first outlined how a key encryption system based on the quantum behavior of photons could work.
“These fundamentals of physics had been lying around for 50 years,” Bennett said. “But there had been little thought about how quantum behavior might be useful for information processing.”
Indeed, the quirky nature of quantum mechanics was considered a handicap. Bennett and Brassard’s breakthrough was to see how that strange nature could be used to our advantage.
Bennett explained that the essence of the technology involves encoding individual photons in one of four quantum orientations: a vertical, horizontal and two diagonal polarizations. These single photons enable an encoding key that is practically impenetrable. The act of observing or eavesdropping by a third party disrupts the key and tips off an intrusion.
Bob Gelfond, MagiQ founder and chief executive, is the former managing director of the hedge fund Millennium Partners (and a first round investor in Amazon.com), said that after first hearing about quantum cryptography in the 1990s, he went looking for a company to invest in.
When he didn’t find any, he decided to start one, founding MagiQ in 1999 with $6.9 million from investors that included Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos.
Gelfond said MagiQ will aim to develop other quantum-based technologies for telecommunications and information processing. In December, MagiQ was named one of 30 technology pioneers at the World Economic Forum.
Grégoire Ribordy, id Quantique chief executive, said the company recently raised a million euros in funding from venture capital firm i2i in Luxembourg, and will use the proceeds to ramp up sales efforts. In October 2003 the firm signed a partnership with two Swiss e-security firms, WISeKey and OISTE, to develop a commercial system.
Ribordy noted that commercializing quantum cryptography will require some evangelizing to a data security industry steeped in mathematics, not quantum physics.
Ray Wagner, a research director with the Gartner Group specializing in information security, called the two firms’ technologies “elegant and interesting.” While Wagner said that he thinks they will find customers such as government security agencies, “my biggest question is how large a market exists for this level of security” when existing encryption protocols are as strong as they are.
Another limiting factor: Quantum-encrypted data can currently only be sent about 75 miles over dedicated private fiber. As a result, the technology will likely be first used to link, for example, a bank with its backup data center outside a city, or between government facilities that are near to one another.
On the subject of quantum computers, Both Ribordy and Gelfond observed that an actual device (in which data is stored not just as bits of 1s or 0s, but as hard-to-fathom mixture of the two) is far on the horizon. But when it does emerge, they believe, quantum cryptography will be even more necessary. Current encryption technologies are so strong that even supercomputers would take years to crack them, yet the most sensitive or secret data needs to be secured for decades or more.
Fifteen years from now, quantum computers could emerge that are able to crack files were once considered safe. In 1994, MIT mathematics professor Peter Shor, then at Bell Labs, developed an algorithm that showed how a quantum computer could break most existing encryption schemes.