The dream of a completely secure, unhackable, and absolutely private digital payment system could soon come true thanks to new research from the University of Vienna.
on a paper published On July 4 titled "Quantum Digital Payments Demonstration," a team of researchers from the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology demonstrated what could be the first "unconditionally secure" digital transaction system based on quantum mechanics.
To achieve this, the researchers encrypted a payment transaction using an entangled pair of quantum photons. Through this entanglement, in which any change in state presented by one photon is mirrored exactly by the other photon, even when they are separated by distance, the researchers were able to ensure that any attempt to modify the transaction is thwarted by the very nature of quantum mechanics. .
According to the researchers' article:
"We show how quantum light can secure everyday digital payments by generating inherently unforgeable quantum cryptograms."
One of the most useful features of quantum entanglement is the fact that we cannot know what state an entangled object is in until we measure it.
An easy way to understand quantum mechanics and measurement is to imagine flipping a coin, then catching and covering it with your hand before you or anyone else can see which way it landed. Until you withdraw your hand, it can be heads or tails with equal probability. Once measured, the uncertainty collapses and you have a measurement.
Scientists can take advantage of this by using entangled objects, such as photons, to ensure parity and send information that cannot be modified or intercepted.
Related: History of computing: from Abacus to quantum computers
Therefore, the researchers generated entangled photons using a laser process and encoded them with transaction information. The photons were then sent through more than 400 meters of fiber optic cables to successfully complete a digital payment transaction between parties in different buildings.
If a bad actor were to attempt an adversarial attack on such a transaction, the quantum state of the photons would collapse due to the measurement, and the system would generate a new pair of entangled photons with a novel, unforgeable cryptogram.
While this may represent a breakthrough in quantum communications for digital payments, there's a small caveat: Researchers currently say it takes "tens of minutes" to complete a simple digital payment using the method.
However, this limitation may only be temporary, as the researchers insist that this is not a hard stop due to the laws of physics, but only a minor technological limitation, which could be resolved through higher intensity photons.
"Indeed, brighter sources of entangled photon pairs have already been demonstrated, which could reduce the quantum token transmission time to less than a second," the authors wrote.
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