honorentheos wrote:It seemed the articles authors biggest concern was a sort of sneakers scenario -
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
And given the current state of cybersecurity challenges, a nation state with the ability to crack any code, including military, would realistically have invented there 21at Century equivalent of the atomic bomb. Or so it seems.
Theoretically - that is, with perfectly implemented quantum encoding hardware - quantum encrypted communications simply cannot be hacked. In a perfectly implemented system, if a quantum encryption key were to be intercepted by an unauthorized party, such interception would be detected and result in loss of (inability for anyone to recover) the encrypted message information.
That is, theoretically. In practice, there remain hardware issues that are unlikely to be completely solved for another decade or so.
For example, you saw that the Chinese encrypted fiber optic link needs to have several "repeater" (or signal strength boosting) stations between the two terminal cities of the system. These repeaters need to "detect" the message in order to amplify it for re-transmission. The message must therefore be de-crypted, amplified and then re-encrypted before it is sent on down the line. There are clearly vulnerabilities inherent in this process during the time that the de-crypted signal exists.
There are other such practical hardware problems inherent in the process of reliably creating, sending, and receiving the entangled photons that constitute the message key in quantum encryption. Again, we may be a decade or more away from solving these.
In the meantime, conventional encryption keys for conventional digital communication systems will (theoretically) remain vulnerable to interception, de-coding and use by quantum systems. The best response for now is the smart use of quantum encryption with safeguards to detect unauthorized interception of encoded message traffic.
In terms of OPSEC, here are a few things to keep in mind.
1. The Nazis did not lose the battle of the North Atlantic because their Enigma encoding system was "hacked" by Alan Turing et al., taking advantage of a systematic error (an operator ending each of his transmissions message with his personal identification) and the capture of an Enigma machine from a German submarine.
The Nazis lost the battle because they truly believed that their Enigma system code was "unbreakable" and failed to implement sufficient operational procedures for its use to account for the possibility that their codes could somehow be broken. Same goes for the codes used by Japanese Navy in WWII.
2. As for the Russians - their loss of secret military information to the USS Parche and other US submarines, was due to their failure to properly secure their undersea cable links to which the US attached recording devices and harvested military data for years. (I had the privilege of working for several years alongside the retired Naval officer who was the XO on the USS Parche during that time.)
3. As for the US - over the years our most valuable secret information has mainly been lost the old fashioned way - through traitors for money.