December 2021. The MSc thesis of our PhD student Daniil Trefilov has won the third place in the annual contest of student research in technical sciences and applied math at the Higher School of Economics.
12 October 2021. A nanosatellite has been deployed in orbit to test laser annealing of single-photon detectors that should heal their radiation damage in space. Update: unfortunately, strong solar flares in October–November killed the nanosat’s computer. So no results. However another mission will test the annealing technology soon.
May 2018. Earlier this year, the University of Waterloo has closed this lab. It is now being rebuilt at the Russian Quantum Center. We have a number of PhD and postdoc openings in Moscow.
October 2017. We’ve just returned from a security analysis trip to ITMO university in St. Petersburg (press in en | ru). Our lab has previously done informal implementation security audit for commercial quantum cryptosystems from ID Quantique, QuantumCTek, and a prototype at the University of Calgary. Now the Russian subcarrier scheme is added to this list. Note added: the analysis results have been published.
Waterloo testing team on a mushroom picking trip near St. Petersburg.Waterloo testing team and ITMO researchers with their commercial prototype.
April 2017. In a carefully worded announcement, the Government of Canada indicates that Thomas Jennewein’s quantum communication demonstrator satellite has been funded. This may make Canada the second country to develop such satellite (China’s one is already in orbit). Our group has contributed to Thomas’ project over the past 4 years, and will try to continue doing so.
February 2017. Having single-photon detectors in space is no easy matter: they suffer from radiation in the solar wind, and gradually break down. See our twopreprints on mitigating radiation damage in avalanche photodiodes that should allow them to survive for several years in orbit.
January 2017. Congratulations to our PhD student Shihan Sajeed for winning an IQC achievement award (top 15% of cohort), given “for his work on identifying security flaws and loopholes in practical quantum communication systems and protocols”.
September 2016. Our experimental confirmation of laser-damage attack on two complete systems has been published. Read news on an earlier preprint, and the final journal article (PDF). Watch 12 min talk by Shihan Sajeed about this paper from QCrypt conference.
September 2014. We congratulate our collaborator Feihu Xu with the Best Student Oral Presentation prize he won at QCrypt 2014. Our group has contributed to the paper he presented at the conference.
February 2014. We have shown that security loopholes in quantum communication systems can be created on-demand, by laser damage. Our article is featured in Physics Synopsys, and on the cover of Physical Review Letters. Read the article (PDF).
August 2013. Huff... QCrypt the 3rd international conference on quantum cryptography, hosted at IQC this year, is over. It was a heavy task for our institute and our students to house it.
January 2013. Our laboratory has been the first at the Institute for Quantum Computing to move to the new Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre building. We are located in room QNC 3303 (and will relocate to QNC 3301 once additional construction there is complete, see pictures below). We have to say the building is fantastic, and the wait has been worth it.
Visiting PhD student Paulo Vinicius Pereira Pinheiro cuts a metal rod.Vadim Makarov stress-tests a newly built instrument shelf.
September 2012. Quantum teleportation experiment over record 143 km distance has been published in Nature (also available in free preprint). Here you can see
sender Alice on La Palma
and
receiver Bob on Tenerife,
shooting bright green alignment beams at each other. The actual quantum states being teleported are carried by red single photons along the same path, and are invisible to the eye. Our lab’s modest contribution to this experiment was to provide special low-noise single-photon detectors, used in Bob on Tenerife. See press about this experiment.
June 2012. Vadim Makarov’s lecture on quantum hacking may be a good introduction to this topic, if you have an hour to watch it:
February 2012. Vadim Makarov and the quantum hacking lab have moved from Norway to the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), Waterloo, Canada. Our goal is to create the world first security testing and certification facility for quantum cryptographic equipment. During the first year of operation, experiments were housed in the old IQC building (RAC1), while our permanent 70 m2 laboratory in the brand new Quantum-Nano Centre on the campus of the University of Waterloo was awaiting installation of air conditioners, blackout curtains and shelving:
News below are from lab’s previous location in Norway.
September 15, 2011. You can watch online Vadim Makarov’s talk about loopholes in implementations of quantum cryptography, given at the QCRYPT conference. (Or you can download 418 MiB video of higher quality.)
July 14, 2011. Our full eavesdropping experiment has been published in Nature Communications. For the first time ever, a complete eavesdropper was built, installed in a running quantum cryptography link, and actually extracted the full ‘secret’ key unnoticed. Quantum cryptography is secure in principle; the hardware problem this demo exploits is patchable. But developers should be beware of undiscovered implementation loopholes! We hope this work will focus their attention on implementation security and make the next generation of quantum cryptography systems stronger. See picture gallery and some comments on this experiment.
Selected press coverage in English:
Physics World |
BBC |
InformationWeek |
Slashdot |
The Register |
computing.co.uk |
Photonics Spectra |
in Norwegian:
digi.no |
ABC Nyheter |
in Spanish:
ALT1040 |
in Polish:
Gazeta.pl |
in Russian:
Компьюлента |
Лента.Ру.
December 2010. What is the proper way to patch the detector loopholes? We reply to a comment by Yuan et al. from Toshiba Cambridge lab. See also follow-up in the press (the journalist concluded that a light-sabre duel with A. Shields may be necessary to resolve the dispute :). Update: months later, we peacefully continue the discussion.
August 29, 2010. We have hacked commercial quantum key distribution systems from both vendors active on the market today, and published it in Nature Photonics.
This attack on commercial quantum cryptography is
the first 100% efficient one, giving the eavesdropper full secret key with zero disturbance to the system,
the first fully implementable one, using today’s technology and off-the-shelf components, and
the first that has been responsibly disclosed, i.e., the vendors have been notified several months before publication: see our joint press release with ID Quantique (PDF).
