Credit card theft is currently costs consumers and businesses worldwide hundreds of billions dollars annually. According to Forbes the cost, in the U.S. alone, were close to $200 billion in 2009 and have likely risen since that time.

Until recently all credit cards relied on a simple magnetic strip, which was fairly easy to copy. More recently banks have begun issuing smart cards, which use a small microchip to make them more difficult to duplicate. What smart cards are more difficult to hack, if the card itself is obtained it can be copied.

Now, a team of researchers from the Netherlands believe that, by applying the quantum properties of photons to credit card security, the problem can be solved once and for all. The strange way that single photons of light behave would make the new security system impossible to hack now and forever.

The new application, known as Quantum-Secure Authentication, is spelled out in the Optical Society of America’s new journal Optica. It involves transmitting a small, specific number of photons onto a card surface and then observing the pattern they create.

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

The behavior of light photons in the quantum world is very different from, even counterintuitive to, our everyday experiences. In that world, a single photon can exist in multiple locations. This makes it possible to create complex patters with a a few photons or even just one.

To make things even more complex, and difficult to understand, observing the quantum behavior of light will cause collapse the quantum nature of light and destroy the information which is being observed. This is related to the famous Schrödinger’s Cat experiment, which is covered in brief in this video from MinutePhysics.

That means that, in theory, the system would create the ultimate foolproof security system. Only a small percentage of people in the world know enough about quantum physics to even attempt to observe the quantum interaction and anyone who knows enough to make the attempt also knows that it is impossible. There is no potential technology that could be invented which would change this reality and so the system would be foolproof forever.

The system would work by coating a credit card with a thin section of white paint containing millions of nanoparticles. A laser would then project photons of light onto the painted area where they would bounce around among the nanoparticles, eventually settling into a complex pattern.

“It would be like dropping 10 bowling balls onto the ground and creating 200 separate impacts. 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,” said Pinkse.

While credit cards are an obvious and immediate application for the technology, Pinske believes that it could eventually be used for building security, ID cards and even cars. The even better news is that, because the system uses existing, inexpensive technologies such as lasers and projectors, it would be relatively simple and inexpensive to implement.