Hackers have cheated a gold-standard test of quantum cryptography. By using lasers to help fake the quantum property of entanglement, they have called into question attempts to build uncrackable cryptographic systems.

Quantum hackers have performed the first 'invisible' attack on two commercial quantum cryptographic systems. By using lasers on the systems — which use quantum states of light to encrypt information for transmission — they have fully cracked their encryption keys, yet left no trace of the hack.

Life is about to become more difficult for countries trying to censor access to foreign websites. A system dubbed Collage will allow users in these countries to download stories from blocked sites while visiting seemingly uncontroversial sites such as Flickr.

Time travel, such as, say, through a “wormhole,” appears to make it possible to distinguish quantum information that usually can’t be distinguished. That ability would disrupt the absolute security of quantum encryption, theoretical physicist Todd Brun and collaborators report online in the quantum physics archive.

Perfect secrecy has come a step closer with the launch of the world's first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption at a scientific conference in Vienna.

A group of international researchers and Siemens Austria has demonstrated in Vienna the transmission of quantum-encrypted messages across commercial telecommunication links. The achievement could bring quantum encryption close to commercial deployment.

University of Vienna researchers hope to send an experiment to the International Space Station (ISS) by the middle of the next decade that would pave the way for transcontinental transmission of secret messages encoded using quantum entanglement.

Secret codes used by the forthcoming European satellite navigation system, Galileo, have been cracked by American scientists, casting doubt on European Union promises that the £2.3 billion project will pay for itself through commercial fees.

Japanese scientists have come up with a method for encrypting messages using quasars, which emit radio waves and are thought to be powered by black holes.

Nazi code that eluded the best cryptographers the Allied forces had to offer during World War II has been solved by an amateur codebreaker with the assistance of a network of computers.