IEEE Spectrum
reports:
Quantum Cryptography Needs a Reboot
Quantum technologies—including quantum computing, ultra-sensitive quantum detectors, and quantum random number generators—are at the vanguard of many engineering fields today. Yet one of the earliest quantum applications, which dates back to the 1980s, still appears very far indeed from any kind of widespread, commercial rollout.
Despite decades of research, there’s no viable roadmap for how to scale quantum cryptography to secure real-world data and communications for the masses.
That’s not to say that quantum cryptography lacks commercial applications. ...
From a practical standpoint, then, it doesn’t appear that quantum cryptography will be anything more than a physically elaborate and costly—and, for many applications, largely ignorable—method of securely delivering cryptographic keys anytime soon.
So it does lack commercial applications. The technology does not do anything useful, as I have explained here many times.
“The same technologies that will allow you to do [quantum crypto] will also allow you to build networked quantum computers,” Bassett says. “Or allow you to have modular quantum computers that have different small quantum processors that all talk to each other. The way they talk to each other is through a quantum network, and that uses the same hardware that a quantum cryptography system would use.”
So ironically, the innards of quantum “cryptography” may one day help string smaller quantum computers together to make the kind of large-scale quantum information processor that could defeat… you guessed it… classical cryptography.
So all these folks think that classical cryptography is doomed. Someone will first have to invent a quantum processor, because we can try to network such processors.
Roger,
ReplyDeleteSabine has just done a recent review of a book called
The Secret Life of Science: How It Really Works and Why It Matters
Jeremy Baumberg
Princeton University Press (16 Mar. 2018)
The book describes the scientific establishment as an 'ecosystem', and like any ecosystem it takes energy (money) to sustain itself, and the pursuit of said money becomes tantamount to the science itself.
What you are describing in the quantum/crypto nonsense is just the pure unadulterated money chasing aspect of the scientific ecosystem laid bare without the flimsy fig leaf of propriety. Science these days is a self serving industry or mega business, it is far more concerned with its own internal and financial well being than actually discovering or doing anything useful. Such is the fate of all self worshiping behemoths.