Alibaba adds IDQ’s QRNG to its cloud-based services, to improve the security of financial transactions

In its latest report published in Nature, Alibaba shows how QRNGs with intrinsic unpredictability can be used to greatly enhance the security of cryptosystems.

Alibaba has tested the use of QRNG for their online services (e.g., Ant Financial, Alipay, Smart Access Gateway (SAG) where high-volume random numbers are required by thousands of servers and real-time post-processing is needed to meet the requirements of online encryption.

 

The report states:

The quality of pseudo-random numbers is related to the complexity of the algorithm. With the increasing computing power, the security guaranteed by the complexity of the algorithm is seriously threatened. In contrast, QRNGs with intrinsic unpredictability can be used to greatly enhance the security of cryptosystems.

True random numbers are critical components in all cryptosystems. The major advantage of the QRNG platform over the other ones is it can avoid the loopholes of predictable random numbers. […] The demonstrated feasibility of implementing quantum random numbers in cryptosystems represents an important step toward enhancing the security of classical communications using quantum technologies.

The applications in SAG and Ant Financial show the practical implementation of quantum technology in data encryption. Our platform demonstrates quantum random number services with sufficient and adaptive generation speeds, reasonably low costs, controllable risks, high stability, and simple maintenance.

 

For future work, Alibaba will consider applications with post-quantum algorithms and QKD. They will also develop and integrate more different QRNGs to enhance the security and speed of their system.

 

Read more about practical implementation and applications here