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News archive

See homepage for more recent news.
  • February 2023. Out of 592 papers allegedly published by Canadian scientists in collaboration with NUDT in China over the past two decades, The Globe and Mail singled out our laser damage of optical attenuators as an example of Canadian research excellence leaking to the China’s army. We had lots of laughs. This was not a collaboration between Canada and China. The journalists need to understand how affiliations appear in papers, before they make such claims.

  • October 2022. A PhD position is open in our lab.

  • December 2021. The MSc thesis of our PhD student Daniil Trefilov has won the third place in the annual contest of student research in technical sciences and applied math at the Higher School of Economics.

  • 12 October 2021. A nanosatellite has been deployed in orbit to test laser annealing of single-photon detectors that should heal their radiation damage in space.
    Update: unfortunately, strong solar flares in October–November killed the nanosat’s computer. So no results. However another mission will test the annealing technology soon.

  • June 2021. A PhD position is open in our lab.

  • May 2021. Our undergrad intern Polina Acheva has won a science communication contest at MISiS university with her video “Breaking is more fun than building” (in Russian), beating 101 other contestants.

  • April 2020. The lab in Moscow took delivery of optical tables.
    Click for larger image. ©2020 Vadim Makarov / RQC
    Click for larger image. ©2020 Vadim Makarov / RQC

  • February 2019. Our recent PhD graduate Anqi Huang has won RBC outstanding thesis award in cybersecurity in the quantum era (top 15% of the cohort) for her “extensive work on attacking QKD implementations”.

  • May 2018. Earlier this year, the University of Waterloo has closed this lab. It is now being rebuilt at the Russian Quantum Center. We have a number of PhD and postdoc openings in Moscow.

  • October 2017. We’ve just returned from a security analysis trip to ITMO university in St. Petersburg (press in en | ru). Our lab has previously done informal implementation security audit for commercial quantum cryptosystems from ID Quantique, QuantumCTek, and a prototype at the University of Calgary. Now the Russian subcarrier scheme is added to this list.
    Note added: the analysis results have been published.
    Click for larger image. ©2017 Vadim Makarov
    Waterloo testing team on a mushroom picking trip near St. Petersburg.
    Click for larger image. ©2017 Vadim Makarov / ITMO
    Waterloo testing team and ITMO researchers with their commercial prototype.

  • May 2020. A PhD position is open in our lab.

  • June 2019. Job opening in Shanghai partly affiliated with our group: an engineer or postdoc in QKD security certification.

  • September 2017. Watch Vadim’s long and slow public demonstration how to do classical crypto by pen and paper (>1 h), or jump straight to the point where he burns one-time-pad :).

  • August 2017. Congratulations to our PhD student Shihan Sajeed for winning the 3rd best poster prize at the Frontiers in Physics conference.

  • August 2017. Watch Vadim’s overview talk at SHA2017 about ongoing deployment of quantum cryptography networks, quantum satellites, and security certification (1 h).

  • April 2017. In a carefully worded announcement, the Government of Canada indicates that Thomas Jennewein’s quantum communication demonstrator satellite has been funded. This may make Canada the second country to develop such satellite (China’s one is already in orbit). Our group has contributed to Thomas’ project over the past 4 years, and will try to continue doing so.

  • February 2017. Having single-photon detectors in space is no easy matter: they suffer from radiation in the solar wind, and gradually break down. See our two preprints on mitigating radiation damage in avalanche photodiodes that should allow them to survive for several years in orbit.

  • January 2017. Congratulations to our PhD student Shihan Sajeed for winning an IQC achievement award (top 15% of cohort), given “for his work on identifying security flaws and loopholes in practical quantum communication systems and protocols”.

  • November 2016. Watch video of Vadim’s up-to-date tutorial on security problems in quantum cryptography technology (1 h 31 min) from QCrypt conference.

  • Laser-damaged optical component. Image from article (PDF)  September 2016. Our experimental confirmation of laser-damage attack on two complete systems has been published. Read news on an earlier preprint, and the final journal article (PDF). Watch 12 min talk by Shihan Sajeed about this paper from QCrypt conference.

  • July 2016. Watch video of Vadim’s conference talk “Challenges to physical security of today’s quantum technologies” (35 min).

  • July 2016. “Detector-device-independent” quantum crypto is not secure against attacks on detectors. Watch 11 min talk by Anqi Huang about this paper from QCrypt conference.

  • January 2016. We have shown experimentally that a countermeasure against our blinding attacks by C. C. W. Lim et al. does not work.

  • November 2014. Video lectures by Vadim Makarov introduce you into our field of research. Watch the basics & technology of quantum cryptography (50 min, 2014), or an extended lecture course (about 3 hours, 2014): introduction to quantum cryptography, quantum hacking part 1, quantum hacking part 2. For a more general perspective, see Michele Mosca’s public lecture Cybersecurity in a quantum world: will we be ready?

  • September 2014. We congratulate our collaborator Feihu Xu with the Best Student Oral Presentation prize he won at QCrypt 2014. Our group has contributed to the paper he presented at the conference.

  • Cover of Phys. Rev. Lett. vol. 112, no. 7 (PDF)  February 2014. We have shown that security loopholes in quantum communication systems can be created on-demand, by laser damage. Our article is featured in Physics Synopsys, and on the cover of Physical Review Letters. Read the article (PDF).

  • August 2013. Huff... QCrypt the 3rd international conference on quantum cryptography, hosted at IQC this year, is over. It was a heavy task for our institute and our students to house it.

  • January 2013. Our laboratory has been the first at the Institute for Quantum Computing to move to the new Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre building. We are located in room QNC 3303 (and will relocate to QNC 3301 once additional construction there is complete, see pictures below). We have to say the building is fantastic, and the wait has been worth it.
    Click for larger image. ©2014 Vadim Makarov
    Visiting PhD student Paulo Vinicius Pereira Pinheiro cuts a metal rod.
    Click for larger image. ©2014 Paulo Vinicius Pereira Pinheiro
    Vadim Makarov stress-tests a newly built instrument shelf.

  • September 2012. Quantum teleportation experiment over record 143 km distance has been published in Nature (also available in free preprint). Here you can see
    Alice & Charlie on La Palma, in Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope. Green tracking beam is pointing over 143 km to Tenerife. Image ©2011 IQOQI Vienna
     sender Alice on La Palma 
    and Bob on Tenerife, in ESA Optical Ground Station telescope. Green tracking beam is pointing over 143 km to La Palma. Image ©2011 IQOQI Vienna
     receiver Bob on Tenerife,
    shooting bright green alignment beams at each other. The actual quantum states being teleported are carried by red single photons along the same path, and are invisible to the eye. Our lab’s modest contribution to this experiment was to provide special low-noise single-photon detectors, used in Bob on Tenerife. See press about this experiment.

  • June 2012. Vadim Makarov’s lecture on quantum hacking may be a good introduction to this topic, if you have an hour to watch it:
      
    Table of contents for this video:
    00:00 Introduction to quantum key distribution technology (prior basic knowledge of quantum cryptography is recommended)
    14:26 Introduction to quantum hacking
    21:58 Bugs in random number generator; the need to trust the manufacturer
    30:55 Double clicks
    33:53 Trojan-horse attack
    42:51 Overview of recent attacks
    44:57 Detector attacks; eavesdropping demonstrations; faking the Bell inequality
    1:10:55 Communicating with the manufacturers; countermeasure development
    A similar lecture is given annually at ID Quantique winter school on practical quantum communications.

  • February 2012. Vadim Makarov and the quantum hacking lab have moved from Norway to the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), Waterloo, Canada. Our goal is to create the world first security testing and certification facility for quantum cryptographic equipment. During the first year of operation, experiments were housed in the old IQC building (RAC1), while our permanent 70 m2 laboratory in the brand new Quantum-Nano Centre on the campus of the University of Waterloo was awaiting installation of air conditioners, blackout curtains and shelving:
    Planned lab layout New IQC building (at left), part of Mike & Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre
News below are from lab’s previous location in Norway.
 
 Eve :(