http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4496893.stm
"Voice and video files streamed over the net could be made untappable and ultra-secure in the next few years thanks to a breakthrough"[]
"The laws of quantum physics guarantee that the properties of the photon change if anyone intercepts it and tries to read the information from it."
""If anyone tries to read the messages, they self destruct," said Dr Shields."
> If anyone tries to read the messages, they self destruct
That's kinda bad for those who actually are supposed to read the messages, no?
It's the ultimate encryption: a vortex forms where the receiver is and swallows everything. :)
Quantum encryption over the net is utterly non-sensical. Quantum encryption isn't really encryption, it's a way to protect against wiretapping. It doesn't apply to data, it applies to communication channels - you can build a physical system for sending data from point A to point B while ensuring that you know immediately if somebody tries to listen in.
To use this on a network, you would need a way to establish a direct physical link between two computers on the network. This completely negates the idea of a network, where you send data through multiple nodes. You could put quantum-encrypted links between all computers, but each computer the data passes through could still listen in on the data to its heart's contents, as it would have to receive it, process it, and then re-transmit it to the next node.
Quantum encryption is useful, but it's really only for special-purpose high-security applications. It also probably gets confused with the possible applications of quantum computing in cryptography, which is a completely different field, and mostly related to breaking encryption.
What >>4 said.
Also, "If anyone tries to read the messages, they self destruct" is not accurate. One could intercept the messages and rebroadcast them, but it would be noticed at the end because the particles would not be exactly the same... in theory. In practice, the receiving point depends on having particles behavior info from the sending point. The hacker would just need to change the behavior info to fit his own remodeled behavior.
If they're using particle behaviour to encode messages, then the message could conceivably self-destruct if enough of it is altered by observation. Imagine, persistent wiretapping can be the next generation of denial of service attacks.
Customer: Where is my email?
ISP: It exists in a non-determined chaotic state somewhere and/or nowhere.
Customer: My next payment to you is going into an uncertainty state as well!