“This technology could one day enable satellites to create secure encryption keys using the sunlight already abundant in space, reducing the need for onboard lasers and much of the supporting hardware,” said Li, first author of the paper. “Sunlight-driven entanglement generation could also provide the crucial ingredient needed to scale up quantum computing without adding to the energy burden.”
Scientists have traditionally believed that producing the strong correlations needed for photon entanglement requires coherent light. In coherent light, the waves remain synchronized so that their peaks and valleys follow a predictable pattern. Lasers are commonly used for this purpose because they generate highly coherent light concentrated at a single color.
link to open access article opg.optica.org/optica/fulltext.cfm?uri=optica-13-…
natanael@slrpnk.net@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
This is neat, but quantum key distribution is stupid as hell because it’s only secure if you START OFF WITH A SHARED SECRET to authenticate the key pad and first round of messages.
And if you have that then you don’t need quantum encryption because you can do everything with just symmetric encryption (unless you specifically have some very weird forward secrecy requirements where it isn’t approved to use asymmetric post quantum algorithms like McEliece)