After the latest celebrity iPhone hack, people being able to protect their privacy has become even more important.

A team of researchers have developed a technique that is able to temporally cloak a signal when attempted spying is taking place along a fiber optic network. A temporal invisibility cloak. Julien Fatome, from the Université de Bourgogne, led the research and published a paper in an open access format in Nature Communications.

Though this is not the first attempt at concealing sensitive information, this seems to be the most complete.

The key to the technique relies on the principle of light polarization, which refers to the directionality of the light’s electric and magnetic fields. Polarized lenses—which can be found in sunglasses—are designed to allow only certain orientations of light through, which cuts down on the amount of light allowed to pass through.

Fatome’s lab developed a device back in 2012 called an Omnipolarizer, which doesn’t block out certain polarizations, but instead converts them into uniform polarization states.

The Omnipolarizer then completely shields data from a fiber optic cable from being read by unsecured sources. To test this, they set up a network involving a data source, an end user, and an Omnipolarizer on either side of an “indiscreet eye” using a continuous wave probe (CW probe) to try to pick up on the information.

The polarization used in (a) allows the CW probe to copy the information that is being sent. In (b), the first Omnipolarizer makes the probe completely blind to the data being transmitted. Credit: Bony et al.

As the signal comes down the fiber optic cable, it is run through the first Omnipolarizer which forces all of the light to adopt the same polarization state that makes it completely invisible to the CW probe. The method was able to cloak 100% of the information from prying eyes, though the cable had been transmitting about 10 gigabits per second.

However, the light cannot stay in this state if it is to be read by the intended target on the other end of the line and once the signal has successfully passed the point of being read by spying eyes, the second Omnipolarizer returns the light to random polarization. Because of this technique, there are no constraints with how far or how long this can be used.

Would you feel more comfortable sending private info if you knew there was a cloak to protect you?

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