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The looming threat of quantum-enabled decryption, along with the practice of “harvest now, decrypt later” has made addressing future security risks today a priority. While post-quantum cryptography remains a critical aspect of securing against a future quantum threat, QCi is helping address the threat by offering communications security products and systems that secure data using quantum principles.
The Quantum Secure Solution is QCi’s line of communications security products which can be integrated as standalone modules into existing infrastructure, or purchased as a complete end-to-end security solution. It operates on the concept that certain quantum phenomena provide not only communications that can only be read by those the sender wants, but also resists eavesdroppers.
Quantum-enhanced security relies on quantum entanglement, a phenomenon that Albert Einstein famously called “spooky action at a distance.” Two quantum particles that are entangled share an intrinsic link so that no matter where they are in relation to each other, if you measure one of them, you instantly know the state of the other. If that sounds impossible, you’re in good company; even Einstein believed that this illustrated a fatal flaw in the theory of quantum mechanics. Entanglement, however, has been demonstrated in laboratories for decades and has become a key basis for securing communications with quantum effects.
So QCi’s quantum communications system starts with a source of entangled photons. Photons are blobs of light that are inherently quantum, but entangling quantum particles requires them to interact with each other and light generally does not interact with itself. So QCi uses special crystals that create stronger interactions between photons, allowing them to be entangled and transmitted as the start of a quantum communication protocol called Quantum Key Distribution (QKD).
QCi has demonstrations available focusing on their test and measurement products using polarization-entangled photons, and their novel QKD system that incorporates quantum identity authentication to protect secure information from the attacks.