The way we secure digital transactions could soon change. An international team has demonstrated a form of quantum cryptography that can protect people doing business with others they may not know or trust – a situation encountered often on the internet and in everyday life, for example at a bank's ATM.
"Having quantum cryptography to hand is a realistic prospect, I think. I expect that quantum technologies will gradually become integrated with existing devices such as smartphones, allowing us to do things like identify ourselves securely or generate encryption keys," says Stephanie Wehner, a Principal Investigator at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore, and co-author on the paper.
In cryptography, the problem of providing a secure way for two mutually distrustful parties to interact is known as 'two-party secure computation'. The new work, published in Nature Communications, describes the implementation using quantum technology of an important building block for such schemes.
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