Dec 17, 2014 12:46 PM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Researchers looking for a new way to prevent credit card fraud are pointing to quantum physics as a way to make them impossible to hack.

According to Discovery News, authors of a study published in the journal Optics are calling the technology quantum-secure authentication (QSA). They believe they can make credit cards' magnetic strips with nanoparticles so minute they would be impervious to hackers.

Currently, credit cards are vulnerable to hacking because the security systems in place to guard their information has been exploited before. The scientists behind the QSA

technology want to offer an authentication process that is impenetrable.

"Single photons of light have very special properties that seem to defy normal behavior," study lead author Pepijn Pinkse, a researcher from the University of Twente, said in a press release. "When properly harnessed, they can encode information in such a way that prevents attackers from determining what the information is."

The idea behind QSA is to offer a security measure that is resistant to whatever hackers may come up with in the future. The researchers said their method would blow up the information exchange during a hacking attempt, no matter what.

The technology to implement this system would also be relatively cheap, since it already exists, and it could applied to credit cards, passports, drivers' licenses and even buildings and cars.

"It would be like dropping 10 bowling balls onto the ground and creating 200 separate impacts," Pinkse said. "It's impossible to know precisely what information was sent (what pattern was created on the floor) just by collecting the 10 bowling balls. If you tried to observe them falling, it would disrupt the entire system.

"The best thing about our method is that secrets aren't necessary. So they can't be filched either."

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