Since the discovery of quantum entangled pairs decades ago, scientists have promised ‘unhackable’ communications. The recent discovery of quantum throuples has thrown that research into a tailspin.

 

Government, military and business entities have long used distinct pairs, which act as a ‘lock and key’ system to send secure communications. Often these were in the form of products of primes (POP), numbers which can only be divided into two whole number factors, (excluding 1 and itself). Since the advent of POP encoding decades ago, government computers have worked 24/7 finding ever larger prime numbers. The largest so far, discovered in 2024 has over 41 million digits. In layman’s terms, it works like this. The system knows the POP number. Only the sender knows one of the factors. Only the recipient knows the other. Only when both sender and receiver send the correct prime number will the encoding system get the correct answer when multiplying them together. Pretty hard to hack, but not impossible.

 

In similar fashion, entangled particles can ‘read’ each other’s quantum state instantly across vast distances. If one particle is forced to change state, the other particle will instantly follow with a state change of its own. So, for secure communications, the sender has one particle, the receiver has the other. Only communications that trigger a change in state of the receiving particle are recognized as having come from the correct sender. One lock, one key. For decades we’ve been told that these particles are star-crossed lovers – quantum couples mated for life and monogamous. No amount of ‘space noise’ could divert the attention of these particles from each other.

 

However, scientists in China have recently uncovered a quantum technique that causes a particle to begin to secretly begin changing the state of a third particle, unbeknownst to its original partner, and undetectable by any outsider. Researchers have dubbed these three way communication entanglements ‘quantum throuples’ and the quantum process used to create them the ‘Ashley Madison’ process, named for the infamous dating service whose customers were almost exclusively married men.

 

With the unhackable security of quantum communications gone, US researchers are now at least looking for a process to detect when one of the entangled pairs goes astray. They are calling themselves The Quantum Impact Team (QIT), named for the team of hackers who made world headlines by exposing the names of Ashley Madison clients in 2015, many of them high level government and business executives. With the promise of 100% secure communications having gone the way of a lower taxes/higher pay campaign promise, QIT is frantically trying to rescue something from the billions of dollars that have been spent on the ultimate cyber dream. Says one researcher who asked not to be named,

 

“If we can’t stop them from hacking us, maybe we can at least generate a ‘this called is being recorded’ flag to warn the sender not to send his name and credit card information to the married guy dating site.”

 

And so, with the ultimate cyber security system unceremoniously downgraded to the level of using one’s own name as a password, the ‘armor vs. bullets’ battle continues to rage in the cyber security world.

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