Quantum crypto gets a speed boost

A team of US scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Colorado and Acadia Optronics, Maryland, claims to have built the world’s fastest quantum cryptography system. Its 730 m free-space link, which uses a stream of single photons to transfer a secret encryption key, offers a key transfer rate of 1Mbps -- about 100 times faster than previously demonstrations. NIST says that the increase in speed could potentially make quantum cryptography practical for applications such as streaming encrypted video or communications across large networks.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) has recently emerged as an attractive technique to create completely secure communication links between banks and military bases and the first commercial systems are now starting to appear.

Although the transmission distances have steadily improved over the past few years, the current records are 150 km in fiber and 23 km in free space, the transfer rate of the key has remained painfully slow, typically 1 kbps or so.

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