ISRO has yet again proved that India is not just developing country.
It has the potential to travel beyond and strip off that tag.
We have the ability to serve the World with our technology be it software, innovation, research and development, pharmaceuticals or vaccine disbursal; human capital or security to disturbed nations across the world.
ISRO has made a recent breakthrough in its quantum capabilities via live video conferencing by demonstrating free-space Quantum Communication over a distance of 300m.
India now joins a handful of other nations like the US, Canada, UK, China and Japan who have made significant contributions in this regard.
This experiment was tested between the two line-of-sight buildings within the same campus of Space Applications Centre (SAC), Ahmedabad and was undertaken at night to ensure that there is no interference from Daylight to derail the test from the possibility of:
- Unwanted background noise photons emitting from sunlight in the spectral, temporal, and spatial domains.
2. Even the scattered lights coming from laser sources (emanating from fiber-optic communication of higher magnitude than QKD) can serve as quite an interference to the concerned signal.
This can indispensably increase the quantum bit error rate (QBER) jeopardizing the security of whole system. Although there are several reports of successful demonstration of QKD(quantum key distribution) systems under daylight conditions as well, it is preferred to avoid such case.
What is Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) technology?
Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a secure mode of communication for exchanging the encryption keys used to encrypt and decrypt messages and are only known to shared parties. This maintains the secrecy and rarely a possibility for retrieving the message by a third party.
It utilizes the properties found in quantum physics to exchange cryptographic keys in a way that is efficient and guarantees security.
Fundamentals of the Tech:
Each photon has a random quantum state, and collectively, the photons sent make up a stream of ones and zeros, called Qubits.
This sequence stream can thus be used as a key to encrypt data being sent.
Challenges to the technology:
- Integration of QKD to existing data infrastructure.
2. A few imperfections do exist in the system as tools like single photon detectors can create security vulnerabilities.
Why QKD is better?
Conventional scale communication relies on public key ciphers whose viability faces several issues, including the new strategies being devised to breach these systems, weak random number generators and general advances in computing power.
Therefore, it serves as a potential tool to make much of today’s public key encryption strategies unsafe and out of date.
How can Quantum Communication make our lives better?
This technology is also not vulnerable to increased processing power.
It has a provision that if an attacker disturbs or peeps at the system, the system will change in such a way that the intended parties involved will know.
It has a new, highly advisable “No cloning theorem” that prevents copying data.
According to ISRO: The conventional cryptosystems used for data-encryption rely on the complexity of mathematical algorithms, whereas the security offered by quantum communication is based on the laws of physics.
“Therefore, quantum cryptography is considered as ‘future-proof’, since no future advancements in the computational power can break quantum-cryptosystem”.
Further, ISRO will now look forward to demonstrate the technology between two Indian ground stations as part of an upcoming experiment.
Boost to Atmanirbhar bharat:
Most of the mission’s critical technologies used in the experiments were built indigenously by ISRO.
It includes the NAVIC receiver which has been used for time synchronization between the transmitter and receiver modules and gimbal mechanism systems instead of bulky large-aperture telescopes for optical alignment.
When the digital world faces inexplicable threats to our dear Data, it becomes important to strengthen technologies that can promise to secure what law has guaranteed to us but fails so often, without an advanced technology.
Thankfully, the time has come for data to remain a bit more personal.