Kind: captions
Language: en
the elections upon
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us and no matter whom you're voting for
you likely want things to be fair free
of fraud no hacking so what if I told
you there could be a way two ways
actually to ensure your vote is
incredibly secure locked up and Beyond
tampering with all thanks to the laws
governing subatomic particles quantum
mechanics offers completely radical new
bizarre ways to implement security using
photons and electrons to protect your
vote crazy maybe but let's face it it
might not be the craziest thing about
this
election first let's consider how
messages you send electronically like an
email or a text or a vote you cast
online get encrypted normally you as the
sender have a device that agrees on a
secret code with the recipient's device
this is also known as a key for example
numbers correspond to the location of
the letter in the alphabet so you send a
sequence of numbers so that only the
person who has the key can decrypt the
encryption since both you and your
friend have the same key when your
encrypted message shows up on your
friend's device it uses that key to
unlock your original message now this
particular code numbers swapped out for
letters is easy to crack so we use
computers and math to make more
complicated codes elaborate strings of
zeros and ones but even the best codes
get reverse engineered and halfed
sometimes without leaving a trace okay
so I promised you two ways to achieve
Total Security for your vote here's way
number one and believe it or not this is
actually possible to do today you
generate a bunch of quantum particles
for example photons which are particles
of light and you control some property
of each Photon their polarization say
which is the direction the light's
electric field is aome ating in and you
convert that into zeros and ones
vertical polarization is let's say zero
and horizontal is one for many many
photons you have a whole sequence that
sequence contains your key your code a
string of zeros and ones that's
impossible to predict you send your
string to the polling station a device
on the other end measures the
polarization of each of the incoming
photons and extracts the key based on
your initial settings that key can now
be used to encrypt your vote and the
polling station uses it to decode your
vote and here's the best part let's say
some hacker tries to intercept the key
the simple Act of observing a photon can
disturb its polarization that's just
quantum mechanics if the sender and the
receiver compare a few of their
polarized photons and find that you know
they don't quite match they can figure
out that somebody else has been trying
to read the information so the hacker
can't help but leave evidence of their
meddling behind and the key now
compromised can be chucked and
regenerated the eavesdropper loses every
time the EAS dropper can never get
around it because it's built into the
laws of physics this is the only known
cryptographic protocol that is perfectly
secure the Swiss actually tried this
successfully in their national election
in 2007 in addition to traditional paper
ballots on to way number two to
safeguard your vote int entanglement and
I don't mean political
entanglement I mean what happens when
two particles two photons say become
tightly locked together whatever
property one of them has the other has
too or they have the exact opposite
always they are linked in a very
powerful way meaning whatever you do to
one of the particles actually impacts
the other particle instantly no matter
where it is in the universe so let's say
you've got a bunch of particles in your
home each entangled with a corresponding
particle at the polling station that's
sort of like having a an open Channel
between you and the polling station you
cast your vote at home and it's
converted into a series of photons each
of them a zero or one just like before
you release these photons one at a time
and each of them meets an entangled
Photon in your home and interacts with
it dances with it and due to
entanglement the corresponding Photon
all the way at the pole polling station
dances 2 which can be observed and used
to reconstruct your original vote
communicating between two entangled
particles like this is the basis of
quantum
teleportation and there's no way to
interfere with it if anybody's trying to
steal your data or a vote or anything
like this instead of physically
transmitting there's nothing to steal
because it's being teleported there are
no wires and no physical ballots just
two particles teathered together in a
way that's impossible to hack so that's
how you create a tamper-free election
and learn something about the quantum
world at the same time a world that's
bizarre at every scale from electron to
election
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