Vadim Makarov's home page

Vadim Makarov
I’m a research assistant professor running Quantum hacking lab in Waterloo, Canada. Here is my one-page CV (PDF), contact information, publications, and full biography.

What’s recent in my life and on the site:

As usual, I will give a lecture at ID Quantique 6th winter school on practical quantum communications in January 2014. See you there!

conference will take place in Waterloo on June 5–9, 2013. I’m chairing the local organizing committee.

February 2012. I have moved to the Institute for Quantum Computing, Waterloo, Canada. I will have my own research group and lab here.

September 2011. I visited Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh :),

Vadim at Heriot-Watt university, September 2011

and Zurich. You can watch online my invited talk at the QCRYPT conference.

June 2011. The first ever fully-implemented eavesdropper on quantum cryptography has been published in Nature Communications. See picture page about our full evasdropping experiment. At this, I declare my 3-year postdoc term at NTNU finished with a reasonable success.

August 2010. Commercial quantum cryptography has been hacked. See our paper in Nature Photonics and picture page about the crack, with links to press coverage at the end.

August 2009. At Hacking at Random, I’ve given a lecture and demoed our quantum eavesdropping equipment. Watch the video of 50 min long lecture on YouTube.

Equipment demo at Hacking at Random conference (photographed by a visitor)

June 2009. Paper based on a significantly updated earlier preprint: V. Makarov, “Controlling passively quenched single photon detectors by bright light,” New J. Phys. 11, 065003 (2009).

September 2008. Preprint: V. Makarov, A. Anisimov, and S. Sauge, “Can Eve control PerkinElmer actively-quenched single-photon detector?”, arXiv:0809.3408 [quant-ph]. It has been covered in New Scientist, in arXiv blog, in Ars Technica, and in Adresseavisen (after that, I have discovered that most media and blogs often copy each other). See also our poster from SECOQC conference (PDF, 13.2 MiB).

Photo of me in the lab, from article in Adresseavisen

June 2008. After a year in Korea, I am back to our group in Trondheim, NTNU. We’re going to do some hacking, err... research about real level of security of today’s quantum cryptosystems.

Eve is a common name for eavesdropping party in cryptography. In cryptanalysis, the study how to break cryptography, Eve is therefore the protagonist. She is depicted here humorously.

Research interests: quantum hacking, quantum cryptography, quantum communications, single photon detectors.

I am a research assistant professor at the Institute for quantum computing, heading the Quantum hacking lab.

List of firms whose products have been considered in my work.

Scanned manuals for some lab instruments.

Things that used to distract me from science:

Photography (see all images)