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This paper explores parallels between concepts defined in cryptography and concepts of biology at different levels of organization. Cryptographic settings, including the presence of an eavesdropper are extensive in the realm of plants and animals. It also turns out that principles of information protection show strong similarities between the two disciplines: computer science and molecular biology. Biological information, as held by the DNA molecule, and digital information, as used in digital communication systems, are subject to analogous procedures of protection and repair when damaged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security in sensor networks, though an important issue for widely available wireless networks, has been studied less extensively than other properties of these networks, such as, for example, their reliability. The few security schemes proposed so far are based on classical cryptography. In contrast, the present paper develops a new security solution, based on quantum cryptography. The scheme developed here comes with the advantages quantum cryptography has over classical cryptography, namely, effectively unbreakable keys and therefore effectively unconditionally secure messages. Our security system ensures privacy of the measured data field in the presence of an intruder who listens to messages broadcast in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been said that quantum cryptography in general offers a secure solution to the problem of key enhancement. This means that two parties who already share a small secret key, can use quantum protocols to establish a new large secret key. This large secret key can be arbitrarily long and is unbreakable. Thus, to date, the main contribution of quantum cryptography has been believed to be quantum key enhancement. This paper shows that quantum cryptography can do significantly more. The quantum protocol described here distributes an unbreakable secret key to the two parties by relying on public information only. This is the first time that quantum cryptography is shown to be able to produce secret information using only public information. This contribution is also unique for cryptography in general, classical and quantum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identity theft problem, an ever growing threat to safety and security in today's society, is very difficult to tackle using classical means, due to the fact that classical information can be easily read and copied. In this paper, we show that we can do more than it is possible classically through the use of specific tools and techniques from quantum information processing and quantum cryptography. Specifically, we devise a quantum security scheme that completely eliminates the problem of identity theft in sensor networks, although our scheme may be of interest in more general situations involving secrecy and authentication. The hypercomputational aspect of this result pertains to the unprecedented level of security achieved, a level that is beyond the reach of classical information processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is intended to be a survey of all the important aspects and results that have shaped the field of quantum computation and quantum information. The reader is first familiarized with those features and principles of quantum mechanics providing a more efficient and secure information processing. Their applications to the general theory of information, cryptography, algorithms, computational complexity and error-correction are then discussed. Prospects for building a practical quantum computer are also analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]