SAN FRANCISCO: A study recently published in The Optical Society’s new journal Optica reveals the development of a fraud-proof method for authenticating physical “keys” – such as credit cards, identification cards, or passports – to help prevent public security issues like credit card fraud and identity theft, using the power of quantum mechanics.
One downside of bank cards is that, with the right equipment and ken-how, they’re fairly facile to clone. That’s not just a quandary for the people whose cash gets purloined, but additionally for the banks that are tasked with averting fraud. It appears that credit card cloning may become a thing of the past if a theoretical system from the University of Twente becomes an authenticity. Rather than utilizing numerical codes which, as Target, Sony and others will attest, are only as secure as the box they’re stored in, this incipient method uses quantum physics.
Put very simply, in lieu of a magnetic divest, future credit cards would have a band of nanoparticles running down one side. When a bank wanted to assign the card to a person, a laser would fire at it, bouncing light desultorily across the divest. The quantum pattern that would be left by the “indentations” would be sufficiently arbitrary that, like a dactyl gram, it’d be too resource-intensive to replicate, if it was at all possible. Unlike other high-faultin’ anti-fraud conceptions, the team claims that this quantum secure authentication works in the authentic world and is, ostensibly, facile to implement with current tech. Now be blissful we didn’t endeavor to work in any remotely puns about taking solace in quantum physics for the James Bond fans amongst you.
