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Quantum entanglement provides a key to improved security

A cryptographic scheme offers a secure way of exchanging data using a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. The approach relies on special quantum correlations between particles that help to prevent tampering.
  1. Krister Shalm

    1. Krister Shalm is in the Department of Physics, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA.

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Every time you buy something online, sensitive information such as your credit-card number is sent to a merchant. To prevent this information from being obtained by a hacker, it is necessary to ‘lock’ it before sending it. Then, if the merchant has a ‘key’ corresponding to the one that was used to lock your information, they can unlock it. But how can these keys be distributed in a secure way, so that only you and the merchant have them? In two papers in Nature, Nadlinger et al.1 and Zhang et al.2 report on a method for using a special property of quantum particles — known as quantum entanglement — to share a secret key without needing to trust the ‘courier’ that performs the exchange.

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Nature 607, 662-664 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01987-3

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 03 August 2022: The original version of this article incorrectly said that the reason a key could not be created in Zhang and colleagues' experiment was because the distance between the atomic systems reduced the rate at which entangled particles could be generated.

References

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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