FEATURE NETWORK SECURITY
A quantum of security
Commercial development of quantum key distribution is coming just in time to meet the security threat from quantum computers, finds Andy Extance
I
f you think practical quantum computers arriving within 5-10 years means you don’t need to worry about their impact on communication network security yet, you’re in for a nasty
surprise. Tat’s according to Jane Melia, vice president of strategic business development at Canberra, Australia-headquartered quantum security system vendor QuintessenceLabs. Adopting new security technology takes at least two years, and that protection must oſten continue for more than five years, so ‘this deadline is actually very close indeed’, she warns. Quantum computers will challenge existing
communication privacy signature schemes where the key used to encrypt and decrypt messages depends on difficult computations. One of the most popular, the RSA algorithm, uses a large number as a public key, obtained by multiplying two prime numbers, which are kept private. Eavesdroppers trying to decrypt the message by working out the prime numbers will be able to do so exponentially faster using quantum computer algorithms than with conventional computers. ‘Tis problem, which would take around 3000
years to solve using classical computers for a 1024 bit key, could now be solved in a matter of minutes,’ Melia said. Yet, quantum phenomena also offer a solution.
Rather than a public key system, where privacy is ensured by computational difficulty, light can be used to generate a private key known only by the sender and recipient. Te resulting, truly random key becomes a ‘one-time pad’, the only existing mathematically unbreakable encryption – which QuintessenceLabs is developing systems to deliver. Switzerland’s ID Quantique, and Japanese giants Toshiba and NTT are among the other companies developing or actively producing such quantum key distribution (QKD) systems. Yet they see varying interest from those who should be preparing for the quantum computing challenge.
Random success As a stepping stone towards QKD, QuintessenceLabs is making existing cryptographic approaches safer by offering true random number generators that use quantum phenomena to replace existing pseudorandom number generators. In RSA encryption, for example, pseudorandom number generator algorithms usually pick the prime numbers, opening the door for weaknesses, Melia explains. ‘Tese types of random numbers have caused breaches,’ she said. ‘Generating true random numbers is actually a really hard problem that we have struggled to solve while delivering commercial throughputs and at acceptable costs.’ Melia’s company splits a laser beam in two and
Jane Melia, QuintessenceLabs
detects the differences between the resulting beams in its qStream random number generators. ‘By carefully measuring and then digitally processing quantum fluctuations, we generate ultra-high bandwidth random numbers,’ Melia said. ‘Te current generation is about the size of a
20 FIBRE SYSTEMS Issue 14 • Winter 2017
cell phone and sits on a standard PCIe card. Our next-generation product will be released at the end of 2016, and will be half that size for the same performance.’ qStream delivers 1Gb/s of completely random
bits, most oſten deployed as part of a key management system. It is integrated into QuintessenceLabs’ Trusted Security Foundation product, which is currently deployed at the Australian bank Westpac, and the global data centres of a leading cloud storage provider. ‘Pilot projects are also underway with a number of defence prime contractors and government agencies,’ says Melia. But, as well as helping today’s security, a raw
stream of truly random bits will help form the encryption keys in QKD. In this system a sender, Alice, can encode a long random sequence of 0s and 1s onto 1550nm photons and send them to a
Eavesdroppers trying to decrypt the message will be able to do so exponentially faster using quantum computer algorithms
recipient, Bob, over an optical fibre. In the first ever QKD protocol proposed, called BB84, Alice chooses between two methods for assigning 0 or 1 values to photons. She can either use circular polarisation, with right-hand or leſt-hand polarisation indicating the two values, or linear polarisation, where the values are represented by horizontal or vertical polarisation. Bob chooses to measure either circular or linear polarisation, obtaining the correct result only if he has chosen the same basis as Alice. Approaches like this that depend on the particle nature of light are known as discrete variable QKD (DV-QKD). ‘Alice and Bob have suddenly got a string of
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