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THE PHYSICS OF QUANTUM CRYPTOGRAPHY |
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By J.J. Nakatsu |
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For over thousands of years a war has raged between two rival factions - codemakers and codebreakers. The two practice the science of secrecy, cryptography. The codemakers write the codes and the codebreakers try and decipher them. Until recently, there has not been a clear winner. Edgar Allen Poe theororized that there would never be a winner, but today it appears the codemakers have won the war. By taking advantage of new technologies involving the transmission of photons and the effects of the Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty, codemakers have developed a new form of cryptography that has been mathematically verified to be unreakable without alerting the sending and receiving parties. |
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ALICE, BOB, and EVE
Alice and Bob have a problem. They want to send secret messages to each other but Eve wants to intercept their messages and because Eve is inherently nosy, decipher their secret communications. This analogy is used in the world of cryptography and is therefore important for the reader to understand that the two parties who wish to send a secret message between each other will be referred to as Alice and Bob while the villan who desires to eavesdrop on their conversation is known as Eve. |
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THE PHYSICS
The latest development in the cryptography war came about because of quantum physics. To learn more about the physics involved in quantum cryptography click here |
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