During the most recent, annual, international Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC 2022) in San Diego, at the expert panel session entitled, “Will Quantum Always Remain Basic Research or is it Ready to Power Great Products?”, the world-renowned telecommunications expert, Dr. Peter Winzer, stated categorically that “Quantum key distribution (QKD) … has yet to yield practical products that solve real-world problems….QKD only strives to provide a secure key, typically at kbps to mbps rates, which is unsuitable for today’s massive traffic needs. Significantly higher speed physical-layer security systems exist, including Apriori Network System’s method for secure, high-capacity optical data transmission.”
There has been a raging debate as to whether QKD will solve the problem of the vulnerability of optical fibers to physical hacking. Despite much research into QKD technology, there remains a lot of skepticism. A United Kingdom National Cyber Security Centre1 (NCSC) white paper referring to QKD, states that “it does not endorse its use in government or military applications…” and the NSA2 asserts QKD, “suffers from limitations and implementation challenges that make it impractical for use in National Security System (NSS) operational networks.”
The U.S. Government’s Committee on National Security Systems3 (CNSS) specified a product that monitors fibers for breaches using more conventional technology.
Gary Weiner, CEO of Apriori, points out that the CNSS4 solutions are designed to detect fiber hacks, but the emphasis is on detectionof tampering and not prevention of fiber hacking or dealing with the tapping problem. Mr. Weiner contends, “the ability of a person-in-the-middle hacker accessing transmission data to monitor, influence and control critical infrastructure could be devastating financially, security-wise, and even impact lives. The sooner service providers recognize this risk and act on it, the better we will all be.”
The Apriori PrivaC™ fiber links guarantee privacy-asssured transmission service by intrinsically defending itself from eavesdropper attacks over an entire protected fiber span.
About Apriori Network Systems
Apriori Network Systems, as a privately held N.J. company, is positioned to be the world leader in cost-effective, privacy-assuring, efficient, practical prevention of physical hacking of optical fiber communications systems. Apriori’s first product, the PrivaC™ fiber platform, based on a patented solution, is presently in final development and available for demonstrations.
Links
1United Kingdom: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/whitepaper/quantum-security-technologies
2https://www.apriorinetwork.com/complementary-to-quantum-key-distribution/
3 CNSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_National_Security_Systems
4 CNSSI https://www.dcsa.mil/Portals/91/documents/ctp/nao/CNSSI_7003_PDS_September_2015.pdf
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