Prof. Mario Martinelli of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering is the scientific coordinator of the POLIQI project, whose aim is to build in Milan an ultra-secure post-quantum network (i.e. safe even after the advent of quantum computers) which will allow the experimentation of the most advanced data transmission and cyber-security technologies.
The project is the result of a collaboration agreement between Politecnico di Milano, Regione Lombardia, ARIA (Azienda Regionale per l’Innovazione e gli Acquisti), Intesa Sanpaolo and the Army’s 1st Transmission Regiment. The agreement is part of Regione Lombardia “Programme of interventions for economic recovery: development of new collaboration agreements with universities for research, innovation and technology transfer”.
Last March, Politecnico di Milano and Regione Lombardia had already signed an agreement to build a network for the exchange of “quantum keys” based on 5 nodes located in the urban fabric of Milan and using optical fibers already installed in the city as a communication channel. This is the first time ever that a real quantum communication network has been created and not just a simple point-to-point communication. Three of the five network nodes will be physically located at Intesa Sanpaolo, the Santa Barbara Barracks, headquarters of the Army’s 1st Transmission Regiment, and ARIA. The other two nodes will be located in the two Campuses of the Politecnico di Milano, Leonardo and Bovisa.
The POLIQI network and the innovative quantum nodes that allow its realization have been completely designed by the Politecnico di Milano (which has already filed two patents to protect it) and will be developed in collaboration with national technological partners, many of which are based in Lombardy. This is a concrete response to the rising threat levels to sensitive data that are affecting all the strategic sectors of economy and society. Post-quantum experiments will pave the way for increasing digital security across the country.
The new network will use the BB84 encryption protocol, which is based on the transmission of single photons, the elementary particles of light, and an information encoding that exploits the principle of quantum states superposition (in this specific case, the photon polarization states). The security from any interception will therefore rely on physical principles and as such it will be “unconditionally” secure, which means that no present or future computing capacity will ever “crack” the code generated with this protocol.
The BB84 protocol is becoming very important in recent years, precisely because it represents a response to the threat that will soon be brought to conventional cryptographic protocols (i.e. based on mathematical algorithms) by the extraordinary computational capacity represented by quantum computers.
