Toshiba is working on encryption technology that’s impossible to crack

While the benefits of our increasingly digital and Internet-connected world are innumerable, so too are the downsides, the most obvious of which is the vulnerability of our information. Your information, my information, the government’s information, corporate information, every kind of information you can think of is vulnerable to hackers.

Not only have cyber-attacks become much, much more common in recent years, they’ve also become more advanced, with hackers using frighteningly complex systems and tools to gain access to sensitive information. Even when hackers aren’t targeting you directly, they can still gain access to everything from your financial information to your medical history by hacking corporations or organizations that you’ve interacted with, just ask Target. Last year, in what has been called the biggest retail hack in American history, an unnamed group of hackers were able to steal the credit card information of tens of millions of people who had used their card to purchase something from target.

Hackers aren’t the only ones looking to get their hands on your information either. As Edward Snowden was kind enough to warn us, the United States government has been gathering information on American citizens in ways and on levels that are as impressive as they are unsettling, and it’s not alone. Across the globe, governments have surveillance systems in place to monitor their citizens, and more often than not, this involves breaking through the encryptions that companies use to protect the data of their customers.

It’s not just your personal information that’s at risk either. Everything from classified military documents to corporate trade secrets is vulnerable to hackers. Sometimes these hackers operate independently, other times they’re working on behalf of a foreign government, and occasionally its even a foreign military conducting cyber-attacks. The bottom line is, the threat that hackers pose has become more serious than ever before, and it’s important that we have the tools to combat them.

This is the inspiration behind the new encryption technology that Toshiba is currently working on, which the company has described as the first such system in the world to use a quantum cryptographic communication system using actual data. I’m not knowledgeable enough about the subject to explain what that means aside from that quantum physics is used to ensure that the digital keys that are used to protect encrypted data remain secret. To put it mote simply, Toshiba is claiming that this means the information you’re encrypting will remain secret, guaranteed.

Using one-time keys to protect encrypted data is believed to be the single best way to ensure that your data remains secret. The problem is, it doesn’t matter how statistically impossible it is to guess these keys when you can just steal them, and that’s what makes Toshiba’s new encryption technology so amazing. While the company is still in the testing phase, and intends to conduct at least two years of testing before it’s released for commercial use, the technology makes it impossible for keys to be stolen, even when interception or wiretapping methods are used.

“The key for Toshiba’s quantum-cryptography system will come in the form of photons that are delivered through a custom-made fiber optic cable not connected to the Internet,” reported the Wall Street Journal. “Due to the nature of the particles, any interception or wiretapping activities on the cable would change the form of data, making any spying attempts detectable. And the one-time key would be the same size as the encrypted data, meaning there will be no repeated use of the pattern, which would make decoding without the correct key impossible, analysts say.”