Good timing: Exploiting Entanglement for Secure Clock Synchronization

Colloquium

Good Timing: Exploiting Entanglement for Secure Clock Synchronization

Antia Lamas-Linares

Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas at Austin

         The ability to synchronize remote clocks is a surprisingly fundamental part of civilian and military infrastructure, from cell phone networks to power grids, onward to GPS and gravitational wave detection. Unfortunately, it is known that it is not hard to spoof a GPS signal and use it to steer a target clock to a desired time. Under non-adversarial conditions time synchronization is a hard physics problem; when a malicious adversary is present, it becomes a task in secure metrology. I will present a protocol inspired by the techniques from quantum communication that allows secure synchronization of two remote clocks in the presence of a well equipped adversary. The experimental implementation and initial experimental results will be discussed.