US military wants to secure the internet by making it more quantum

The American army has launched an initiative to determine how quantum devices and particles could increase traditional communication networks – such as those who make up the Internet – to make them more secure.

Quantum networks that share information through quantum states of particles are extremely secure. For example, messages from these states cannot be surreptitiously copied, thanks to the properties of quantum physics. For this reason, several quantum communication networks have already been built in the world.

But an entirely quantum internet has been hampered because we do not know how to build some of the crucial devices to make it work. Instead of waiting for all the outstanding questions to be answered, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a program to identify the short -term advantages of making the communication networks exist more quantum.

Above all, the agency’s objective is to identify quantum additions that will be practical and useful in the near future, explains Allyson O’Brien, head of the Darpa quantum network program (Quanet). “We can’t do everything in the batt,” she says.

In August, the Quanet team met for a hackathon that culminated in a concrete demonstration: the light put in a special quantum state was used to transmit images such as the Darpa logo and a simple graphic of a cat. To its best, this early test of a quantum augmentation network has reached high enough bit rates to broadcast high definition video.

O’Brien says that the quantum states of this demonstration are just one example of a range of quantumness that the Quanet explores program. Researchers also work on “hypertangling”, where several properties of light would be simultaneously linked by the inextricable bond of quantum tangle. Preliminary mathematical models suggest that hypertensive can help code more secure information with less light signals, reducing the resources that the quantum network would need.

At the other end of the spectrum, the team explores light in its not fully quantum network but similar to a quantum. This implies drawing up light with certain properties of quantum states without forcing a complete fundamental change in its physical character.

Quanet researchers also develop a quantum network interface card, a component that can be connected to communication devices to allow them to transmit and receive quantum signals.

There are many open questions on the useful of these interventions, and at what steps and levels of network design, they are best deployed. But O’Brien says that Quanet brings together quantum physicists, electrician engineers and network specialists to answer these realistic questions as possible.

“Quantum networks will not solve everything,” said Joseph Lukens at Purdue University in Indiana. They only excel in some tasks, and the most effective way to perform them will always understand certain traditional networking devices. “The future is that quantum networks will automatically have to be integrated into conventional networks,” explains Lukens. In his opinion, this makes programs as a precious quanet – despite all the questions about how to quantically increase the very well developed and omnipresent internet infrastructure that we already have.

It would be a great success if the program developed a system where users could sometimes go to an ultra-secure “quantum mode” on their devices. In this way, we could all take advantage of these increases without knowing anything about the laws of quantum physics, explains Lukens.