Victory for the Quantum Code Maker?

Humans have used cryptography for more than two centuries. While the first cyphers were fairly-easy-tocrack letter swapping codes, cryptographic protocols have improved over the years, and today their use for securing bank transactions and other sensitive data is widespread. However, the schemes being used today are, in principle, breakable and the privacy of our data relies on the presumed difficulty of performing the breaking algorithm in a reasonable time. This is the best we could hope for in a world governed by classical physics. But our world obeys quantum physics, whose principles allow for verifiably secure message transmission. In the last 15 years we have seen the development of protocols that promise an even stronger notion of security still, under the name of device independence. To date, deviceindependent schemes have suffered from practical drawbacks, such as low noise tolerance, or needing unrealistically many devices. Umesh Vazirani of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Vidick of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, achieve a significant milestone by demonstrating theoretically how to remove these disadvantages, while still maintaining full security [1].