A new encryption system, which its creators say is unbreakable, got its first test run Wednesday in Vienna, scientists from the European Union project SECOQC announced.

digg user kinthiri explains:
Quantum cryptography is unbreakable because if any 3rd party views it that does not have the credentials and is not the intended recipient, the simple viewing of the encrypted data by that third party changes that data such that even the intended recipient can’t decrypt it. Thus they know that there is a 3rd party viewing the stream. Effectively the data self destructs if anyone attempts to intercept it or decrypt it. This is not a new phenomenon.

What is new is that its being used commercially. It had previously been used experimentally by the military in association with researchers, but this is the first time its been brought to life outside test environments and is available commercially.

The nature of quantum mechanics makes this truly unbreakable. You couldn’t even factor this using your own quantum computer, if you could even get one with enough qbits.

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I’ve been really getting into the world of Quantum computing. It looks like the Information Age is TRULY in its infancy. Quantum computing which scientist are now predicting will be available by around 2020 will be one of many systems that change everything about the human species. It is an exciting time to be alive for certain:

Seth Loyd
What is ridiculous about these systems is that they will be so powerfull that they will be able to break AES, DES, 3DES and other cryptological methods that are based on “difficult math” such as factoring prime numbers. Once quantum computers get going, Internet encryption will be irrelevant. That means credit card, bank and any thing with classical encryption will no longer be safe because quantum computers will be sniff out all the encrypted traffic (this is already doable) and then crack the encrypted data with something like a quantum L0ptCrack.

The NIST has an page that talks about Quantum Key Distribution:

Quantum encryption systems use lasers to generate individual pulses of light called photons. Each photon is sent in one of two modes, either vertical/horizontal, or plus 45 degrees/minus 45 degrees. Within each mode, one orientation represents the digital value 0, and the other represents the digital value 1. To visualize how this works, imagine that each photon is a tiny envelope moving perpendicular to the ground (vertical=1), parallel to the ground (horizontal=0), tilted at 45 degrees to the right (plus 45 degrees =1) or tilted 45 degrees to the left (minus 45 degrees=0). NIST