EU To Use Quantum Crypto-Key Passing To Beat ECHELON

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

[further parts of this post were recovered on 13 October 2018]

Now here’s an interesting article [security.itworld.com]. It seems that the European Union is investing €11 million over four years into developing a secure communication system based on quantum cryptography.

For those of you not in the know, quantum cryptography (for passing crypto keys) works like this:

Quantum Cryptography For Dummies

1. Alice wants to send Bob secret message, confessing her undying love, but doesn’t want anybody else to know how she feels.
2. She fires some photons out of a special tube, so that some of them spin in different directions.
3. Numbers are assigned to the different directions of spin, and she multiplies these together – along with a few prime numbers, for good measure – to get a Really Big Number.
4. Then, Alice does some clever sums on the letters in her love letter, using the Really Big Number.
5. Alice posts the first line of the new love letter to Bob (the line that says “Dear Bob,”). This is known as the ‘message header’. If Bob sends a message back saying that he got this, Alice will send the rest of…