Safety in Numbers

After 18 years of development, the Los Alamos advanced encryption technology QKarD (a smart card based on Quantum Key Distribution) is headed to market. In the largest information technology agreement ever signed by the Laboratory, the startup company Whitewood Encryption Systems, Inc., aims to use the patented technology to develop a commercial device for creating completely secure electronic communications.

Anyone who has ever had a credit card number stolen online, or worse, a complete identity stolen, will know just how important it is that companies keep their customers’ data secure. Conventional encryption methods are not perfect and rely on the difficulty—not impossibility—of cracking a code to steal information. QKarD meanwhile uses an encryption system that is both rapid and completely secure, even against future methods of cracking. One of the key innovations that enables this is the ability to produce truly random numbers—an essential component of secure encryption. There are many prominent examples of codes being cracked due to imperfect random number generation; e.g., Sony’s master key for authorizing software on Playstation 3 was stolen in 2010, and the Bitcoin implementation on Android devices allowed Bitcoins to be stolen in 2013.

Encryption is the process of encoding information such that only individuals who possess the same secret numerical “key” may unlock the message. This process is fundamentally simple: Information is encrypted by carrying out a mathematical operation on it in combination with the key. For instance, the operation could be multiplication by the key. Say the message to be communicated is 7 and the key is 3; then the encoded message would be 21. In order to decipher the information, the recipient would reverse the operation using the secret key—they would divide 21 by 3 to get the message 7. Of course, in reality, the message is rarely as simple as 7, and the encryption operation is much more sophisticated than multiplication, but the principle is the same: without the key (and knowledge of the operation), the information remains encrypted.

But how does one choose the value of the key? This is where random numbers come in. If an identical message, such as an individual’s checking account number, is repeatedly encrypted with the same secret key, the encrypted output would be the same every time, so it is essential to vary the key with each encryption. And the more random this variation proves to be, the more resistant the encryption is against being cracked. The rapid generation of a large number of keys is important for commercial or security applications in which a large number of secure transmissions is processed daily. Machine-generated random numbers used for encryption keys are typically either derived from physical phenomena, such as microscopic electrical sources of white noise, or from a so-called pseudo-random algorithm: a complex mathematical formula that generates numerical sequences that appear random to anyone who doesn’t know the formula’s inputs. The former method is slow to generate a large quantity of random numbers and is susceptible to manipulation at the source of the noise, whereas the latter is vulnerable to mathematical code cracking. QKarD, however, manages to achieve both the large quantity needed and true randomness by exploiting the inherently probabilistic nature of quantum particles such as photons (particles of light).

The quantum encryption platform currently requires that the sender and the recipient be linked via fiber optic cable to a central server to allow communication of the quantum keys with photons rather than ordinary electrical current. Therefore, the target market for the new QKarD product will likely be a single fiber optic-linked organization housed under one roof or within a contiguous campus. Future development of the QKaRD concept will focus on broader long-distance communication.

Ray Newell, a physicist on the Los Alamos QKarD team assisting in the technology transfer process with Whitewood, says the first commercial prototype system will be in operation later this year. Some of the initial marketing challenges will involve reducing production costs to be competitive in the current market and convincing potential buyers to invest in a fundamentally new method of encrypting their data. Yet if successful, QKarD will bring with it a much-needed, renewed confidence in information security, with high-throughput encryption that is unbreakable by any known or foreseeable cryptographic methods. Eventual applications include systems for banking, online transactions, secure facility access, electronic voting, and more.