Time is Ticking
Quantum tokens, quantum deadlines, and quantum drones
In a first for me, I’m delivering this newsletter an hour late to accommodate an 8AM media embargo on the opening story. In my eyes, I’m officially a journalist now!
Show Me the Quantum Money!
Today, my team and colleagues at Quantinuum announced the first demonstration of quantum tokens sent over commercial-grade QKD equipment.
Quantum tokens are a novel financial instrument, inspired by the concept of quantum money. They offer three useful properties for financial transactions: unconditional unforgeability, near-instant settlement, and user privacy. We are not aware of a classical solution that can guarantee all three.
Unlike quantum money, which was imagined in the 1980s, quantum tokens are a hybrid of quantum and classical communications. This avoids the requirement for long-term quantum memories, while delivering many benefits of quantum money. We anticipate this technology will have multiple use cases across the financial industry, including high-speed financial trading, and ultra-high security access control.
Our demonstration took place in Tokyo, alongside our partners Mitsui and NEC. Token data was delivered over 10km of fibre, using two QKD devices from NEC.
You can read more about this in our white paper (PDF). A press release is also available.
Our team will continue to focus on this technology, and I’ll share further updates as we hit new milestones.
10 Years to Go…
NIST has spoken. RSA and ECDSA are banned from 2035.
Also, key lengths offering 112-bit security are deprecated (but not banned) after 2030. This includes 2048-bit RSA and 224-bit ECDSA.
The new rules are from NIST IR 8547, which was just released for public comments. The 2035 date is no surprise since it matches the deadline already given to federal agencies to complete their migrations.
The main symmetric algorithms are unaffected, as they provide at least 128 bits of security.
NIST IR 8547 is a 29-page document, but other than the timeline announcement, there’s nothing new to read. Page 13 is where you find the good stuff.
View the whole doc here: https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/ir/8547/ipd.
The clock is ticking! Ten years to go…
Droning On About QKD
Once again, Chinese scientists are pushing the boundaries of quantum key distribution, this time using drones.
A team from Nanjing University has successfully conducted prepare-and-measure QKD over a 200-metre distance between a hovering drone and a ground station. They achieved a key exchange rate of over 8 kHz, with a drone weighing about 30 kg.
I’m not sure drones are the best long-term solution for the last-mile delivery problem. But it’s a cute experiment and maybe something for Amazon drone deliveries to consider!
You can read the paper here: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.200801.