India’s first quantum communication line made operational

• A highly secured link, developed by Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), under Department of Telecommunications, was established for the first time in India.
  • The communication is link between Sanchar Bhawan and National Informatics Centre.
• A ₹10 lakh prize money for ethical hackers who can break the encryption of the system was also announced.

About Quantum Computing

• Quantum Communication refers to communication channels that leverage laws of quantum physics to protect data and make it more secure than traditional transmission.
• In traditional key-based cryptography, data and keys are sent as classical bits (representing 1 and 0) as a stream of electrical or optical pulses.
• However, in a quantum communication network, data is transmitted via qubits.
• Qubits are particles – usually photons of light – in a superposition state, meaning they can be in multiple states and represent numerous combinations of 0 and 1.
• If a hacker tries to read them in transit, super-fragile quantum state “collapses” to either 1 or 0 and attempt to hack will also be recorded eventually.
• This property has helped to create networks for transmitting highly sensitive data based on a process called quantum key distribution, or QKD.
• QKD involves transmission of encrypted data as classical bits while decryption key is encoded and transmitted in a quantum state using qubits.