China builds computer network impenetrable to hackers

However, Prof Pan said eventually all communications in China, down to storing photographs on cloud servers, could feature quantum encryption.

"Ten years ago it was not so easy to get sufficient funding to support theoretical research, but since 2006 and 2007 when the economy really went well, they have been putting more money into research and then it really sped up," he said.

Half an hour's drive away from Prof Pan's office, at Quantum Communications Technology, a company spun out of the university to commercialise the technology, the importance of the project is clear. On the walls are framed photographs of visits from almost all of China's top leaders, including president Xi Jinping.

A huge video screen shows 56 terminals across the city that are already using quantum encryption. Currently, anyone wanting to send a secret message over the internet encrypts their communications so that only someone with the right code at the other end can unlock it.

But the US National Security Agency reportedly has computers powerful enough to crack encryption codes and is developing a quantum computer that will be able to run calculations so quickly that it can easily defeat encryption.

That means that, if it is able to tap fibre-optic cables and copy data travelling down the line, its hackers should be able to unlock the information.

Quantum encryption relies upon writing the encryption codes, or keys, upon single photons of light (a quantum particle). If a hacker tries to eavesdrop on the line, they will disturb the encoding of the photon and be detected. Consequently, said Prof Pan, it should provide perfect security.

"Of course, although quantum communication can in principle provide absolute security, in practice, we have to prove it thoroughly by various hacking tests. So we are inviting the finest hackers to attack our system," he said.

"The Chinese are really pushing the boundaries," said Raymond Laflamme, the head of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Canada. "They are moving at an incredible rate. No one else around the world has plans that are this ambitious."

"China is putting itself in the position of having secure private information that other countries will not be able to tap," he added.

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China builds computer network impenetrable to hackers