In the future, identity thieves and Internet hackers may find themselves out of a job - or at least that's what one Calgary scientist is hoping.
Wolfgang Tittel, from the University of Calgary's Centre for Information Security and Cryptography, is working on a way to secure personal information to stop those trying to gain unauthorized access.
His approach marries quantum information science with encryption technology. The offspring of these - he hopes - will be a system that moves data on light particles so fast, it essentially teleports it from one end to another.
Tamper-proof info
To achieve this ultra-secure state, Dr Tittel is using fibre optics to send data on photons. The fibre optics would act as superhighways for bits of information. Hypothetically, this data would move so fast that any attempt by a hacker to obtain private information would interrupt the flow and alter the encryption in such a way that it would show it has been tampered with.
A fundamental law in quantum physics holds that it is impossible for a hacker to access a key without changing it: In this application, security codes would be carried in bundles with a particular configuration. If the bundles were disrupted during transmission, they re-configure and the information scrambles.
Today and tomorrow
At the moment, there is no way to tell whether a key has been accessed. Some technologies are capable of scrambling the information for short periods of time, but they still leave questions as to whether it was copied.
But Dr. Tittel is working to change that in the next several years. While he notes that initial uses will likely be the military, he projects that one day, everything from Internet banking to medical records will be hacker-proof.
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