Advertisement ::

Enlarge Cartoon

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Id Quantique, a Geneva-based security company, announced Wednesday as the Geneva Security Forum opened that it will distribute, with Australian-based Senetas, a joint high-speed encryption system using quantum key distribution technology. Customers are mainly banks and military organizations with very high-security requirements. The two announced in January that they had developed a joint product.

The idea behind it is simple: a system, using quantum physics, protects the channel carrying the data. The encrypted data is carried in photons via fiber optic cables. If the data is observed, the fact of viewing it modifies the data. The long numbers currently used to safeguard most Internet transactions rely on increasing complex numbers, a mathematical solution that pits number hackers against code creators.

Ribordy spoke to GenevaLunch before the conference opened, about where encryption is headed.

"We do quantum physics but we needed to interface with
cryptographers. When we started 10 years ago people said that’s
interesting but it’s a solution looking for a problem." The early
research was funded by the PTT, the state telecommunications business
that later became Swisscom. Encryption using mathematics, complex
numbers that would take so long to decode that they could provide
protection, was growing in popularity. The idea of taking quantum
physics – the physics of the microscopic world – and applying these
principles to the information process appeared interesting but did not
offer immediate practical applications.

But in the past decade it has become increasingly apparent that
faster computers would make it possible to decode even the most complex
numbers, and in early 2007 a team at EPFL in Lausanne showed how close they could come.

Fiber optic cables began to look interesting as a means of carrying
encrypted information but researchers showed that by bending a cable
and shifting the light you could extract the information. The security
industry began to see the value of protecting the way in which the data
is sent.

Ribordy compares the problems to a tennis ball with a message
written on it being sent through the air. The tennis ball is
intercepted by a butterfly, the Internet’s hacker. Using a quantum
physics system, such an interception modifies the message itself, so
the hacked information cannot be used.

Id Quantique’s solution is a high end application, Ribordy admits,
largely because of the high cost entailed by a new product with
research behind it. "There is no reason why it can’t be a product for
the rest of business in the medium term," he believes.

Advanced technology might offer the promise of greater security to
companies, but Ribordy says his wish list for security-minded companies
focuses more on the human element in risk. He suggests managers think
of five key steps:

• put into perspective the electronic risks the organization has: get a good view of the risk landscape
• once you have a list of the problems, see how to fix each of those – a process followed by more and more large companies
• separate the people who check the system from those who implement the work
• keep in mind that under certain laws the board and the management can be liable for security problems
• remember: risks equal people, always.