Thursday, May 28, 2020

3.4 IPsec, Quantum Computing and QKD

(Back to the top of this sequence of postings.)

(This one is just a placeholder, but there is surprisingly little documented about this kind of work.  Even e.g. the publications describing the recent Chinese QKD satellite experiment say, "We used AES plus QKD," or, "We used QKD-generated keys as a one-time pad," but they tell you nothing about the network or transport layer protocols used, so who knows?  Might be documented elsewhere on the web, or described in talks, but so far I've failed to track down anything authoritative.)

Chip Elliott was the first to modify IPsec to work with QKD, as far as I'm aware, described in a 2003 SIGCOMM paper.  Shota Nagayama drafted and implemented a more formal protocol modification for his bachelor's thesis working with me, back in 2010, but we failed to push that from Internet Draft to RFC.

(More to come here, eventually, on both the use of QKD with protocols such as IPsec and on how effective quantum computers will or won't be at breaking communication security.  Some of this will also be covered in Section 5.)

No comments: