Brit scientists develop 'uncrackable' codes for secure communications

A team of British scientists have reportedly discovered a way to build communications networks using quantum cryptography and impenetrable codes, crucial for sensitive electronic data transfer.

With increased threat to sensitive electronic data being vulnerable to attacks, the impenetrable systems are based on communication systems in which the information is carried by individual photons and once the photons of light are observed, they change and cannot be intercepted by an ' eavesdropper' without leaving detectable trace.

The uncrackable codes called as 'quantum key distribution' (QKD) can allow information from up to 64 users combined and transmitted through a single fibre link and detector, the BBC reports.

Andrew Shields of Toshiba's Cambridge Research Laboratory and colleagues, who demonstrated the system, said that encoding information on individual photons of light has the unique virtue that it allows the secrecy of the communication to be tested.

Hannes Huebel of Stockholm University said that the QKD can soon be incorporated more widely and in the next decade people could have a laser in their smartphones which would allow them to send encrypted information to others.

The researchers said that the newly discovered system opens the way for quantum enhanced secure communications between companies and members of the general public equipped with handheld mobile devices, via telecom-fibre tethering.

However, a theoretical physicist Karl Svozil disagrees that the protocol is entirely secure and said that the protocol required the classical channel to be uncompromised for quantum cryptography to work adding that the newly proposed protocol is 'breakable' by middlemen attacks.