Quantum Cryptography: An Uncertain Future for Information Security

Every day, it seems, governments and corporations fall victim to data leaks

caused by anonymous online crusaders or foreign terrorist organizations — leaks which

call into question the efficacy of modern computer security measures. Quantum cryptography,

the use of quantum mechanical principles to make and break codes, could alter the way cybercrimes are committed,

The Scytale is a type of transposition cipher used in ancient Greece, which involved wrapping cloth around a stick. Image Courtesy of Wikipedia.

As well as the way in which we defend against them. Quantum computing threatens to exacerbate our current information security problems by compromising current encryption techniques, and if this comes to pass, then quantum key distribution could level out the cybercrime landscape by restoring securityin World War II, involved multiple arrangements of the alphabet to encrypt messages.

Deriving from the Greek words kryptos, for ‘hidden’, and graphein, for ‘writing’, cryptography is defined as the science of writing secret codes. For thousands of years, the practice has been used to protect state secrets and to transmit war strategies. The ancient Greeks wrote messages along cloth wound around sticks of a specific diameter, and the Romans developed the first substitution cipher, called the Caesar Shift, in which each letter in a message was shifted forward a certain number of places. Later ciphers, such as those produced by the Enigma machines used by German forces