The process allows two parties to share, without the risk of interception, a secret key used to encrypt and decrypt the information.
But to date this technique has only been effective between two users, rather than a network of multiple users.
For a party of eight users to each send information to each other, for example, each one has to be establishing one-on-one connections with every other user.
One way of avoiding this is to add a third party to each transmission, but having this 'person in the middle' can be a security risk.
Sebastian Neumann at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, one of the experts involved in the project, explains the issue on a blackboard.
