Hackers blind quantum cryptographers [telecom]

I know more (although really only a _very_ little bit more).

The item from Nature News looks good, sounds solid to me (within my limited ability to judge), and is quite readable by lay readers.

The field of quantum cryptography is "new" to me, too, even though I designed and manufactured products using DES back in the 1980s-1990s and worked for a company employing crypto technologies in its products from its founding in 2000 to its buyout in 2006.

A better website with pictures may help understanding this:

A multi-lingual press release with pictures may help, too:

Here's a paper I found to be interesting and understandable:

and here's a technical paper for some nitty-gritty (clicking on the following URL will present a PDF paper):

I'm still recovering from a wedding this weekend so please don't ask me to explain the math. :-)

I've just gone through the first article so far, but _given_ that the methodology causes the receiver to function as only a 'classical' detector, *AND* that there is no way (not established) for the receiver to detect that it is not operating in 'quantum' mode, then everything else follows.

At a _first/cursory_ glance, it looks like this should be relatively easy to defeat -- by injecting some 'pre-tampered-with' bits at the originating side. On a direct receive, they'd show tampered, but on a 'blinded' detector they'd show good. You'd have a data stream that was 'too good to be true', in effect. :)