Long hailed as the future of electronic security, quantum cryptography has arrived. As Swiss company id Quantique introduces a commercial quantum cryptography system and an American company, MagiQ Technologies, plans to unveil a second, at least one of the field's leading . . .
Long hailed as the future of electronic security, quantum cryptography has arrived. As Swiss company id Quantique introduces a commercial quantum cryptography system and an American company, MagiQ Technologies, plans to unveil a second, at least one of the field's leading researchers believes the technology is already being used to send data in the nation's capital.

Quantum cryptography is the ultimate in ciphers. Drawing on the seemingly magical principles of quantum mechanics--the physics associated with very small particles--it allows two people to exchange encryption keys over a public network, use those keys to encode their correspondence, and know that the correspondence is completely secure. In theory, if you encode an e-mail message, a telephone call, or a financial transaction using quantum techniques, the content will be hidden from the eyes of interlopers not only for the moment, but for eternity.

Chris Fuchs, a Bell Labs scientist who's been at the forefront of quantum research for the past decade, is convinced the government has already put this impenetrable padlock on much of the top-secret correspondence it sends across Washington.

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