At least it doesn’t if there’s a high civilization to borrow from. 38 North‘s Martyn Williams reports on North Korea’s latest apparent achievements in the realm of quantum encryption:
North Korean media hasn’t provided much coverage of the development, which indicates it could still be in the research stage.
I’ve only been able to find two reports on the system. The first was in the Tongil Sinbo on February 27, 2016, and the second was on March 24, 2017, in the Naenara online magazine.
The reports say it was developed by a team at Kim Il Sung University.
The Naenara report mentions that the North Korean system is based on BB84, which was the first quantum key distribution protocol. It was originally developed by researchers at IBM and the Université de Montreal in 1984. And it mentions the error rate of the North Korean system is 3.5 percent against what it said was an international allowable error rate of 10 percent.
That all points to a working system in the lab, but putting it into real world use is very different and more complicated.
Still, it just takes persistence to make it work, and access to advanced science journals. And you can’t lock those away, because science advances best when researchers are free to discuss the state of their fields – so I wouldn’t argue that we need to keep North Korea from gaining that scientific information. That’s a mug’s game.
The news out of North Korea just keeps becoming less and less pleasant, doesn’t it? Martyn notes that it’s unlikely that it’ll be useful from Pyongyang to the launch sites just yet – but that’s only a temporary relief. Intelligence analysts had better be thinking about what to do when it does become widespread in North Korea – and what to do about it.
