The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce has stated that U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the third quarter of 2016 will reach $101.3 billion dollars, which is a 4% increase from the second quarter of the year. This increase has been a trend in the market for close to a decade. With the increase in e-commerce sales comes the need for stronger data security. In an article published by Intel Security the company estimates the annual cost to the global economy due to cyber crime at approximately $400 billion dollars. The impact to the global economy coupled with the increase in e-commerce transactions has created an environment where conventional security practices are simply not enough.
The most common security protocol utilized today is Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which has been shown to be vulnerable to many types of attacks. Quantum cryptography may be the answer we’re looking for to resolve our vulnerabilities in data-sensitive applications, such as: online shopping and banking. By cutting out third parties from the encryption process and exploiting the laws of physics, quantum cryptography can detect when a man-in-the-middle attack is happening and can resist exhaustive key searches since it doesn’t use mathematical functions to generate encryption keys.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have been doing extensive research into the development of quantum cryptography as a way to increase data security. Alan Mink, an electronic engineer in NIST’s Advanced Networking Division has stated that, “it is a complicated protocol and is still a work in progress.” Currently, quantum cryptography is in the early stages of its development to becoming a viable security solution, but the promise is surely there.
Image courtesy of Braintree.