By Katie Greene
On any given day, millions of e-commerce transactions send credit card and bank-account numbers zipping across the globe. To keep the bits of information private, companies such as PayPal use encryption software that employs mathematically intense algorithms. In a more advanced tactic, researchers now report sending a message embedded in light and masked by a wildly fluctuating laser beam. The message successfully traversed a commercial optical-fiber network.
In this new encryption strategy, a private message is converted into and travels as laser light. The information is hidden within a laser beam that undergoes chaotic intensity fluctuations. Such chaos-encrypted communication had already been mastered in laboratories. In the Nov. 17 Nature, an international team details how it sent such a message over 120 kilometers of fiber optics running throughout the city of Athens.