Developing secure methods of communication over the internet has been a chief concern ever since the world wide web was first popularized in the early 90's. Now there is a new technology being developed that promises to deliver an almost 100% secure line of communication.

The technology is known as the quantum internet, and it is one of the most promising advancements in the internet among most tech-savvy circles. Interestingly enough, the U.S. government has had a working quantum internet up and running for around two years now at its Los Alamos research facilities.

So just what is the quantum internet? A simple answer was given by one of the officials at Los Alamos who described the research paper the labs have been working on, "Network-Centric Quantum Communications with Application to Critical Infrastructure Protection."

"We described a network that had multiple devices that was able to communicate with a central hub," Los Alamos National Labs chief scientist Richard Hughes told CBSNews.com.

When imagining the system, just picture a central hub of information that a bunch of computers are connected to. These computers would be equipped with a quantum module that would be capable of sending a "one-time pad" to the central hub.

"Our next-generation [module] will be an order of magnitude smaller in each linear dimension," officials from Los Alamos claim.

The one-time pad is a system of sending messages that will make for an unbreakable communication code. One-time pads encrypt messages that are shared between the central hub but change immediately after being sent, thus making it impossible to hack without direct access to either the central hub or the computer that sent the message. They get the name "quantum" after quantum particles, which change position while observed.

Quantum networking has been praised as the next big advancement in technology, and millions of dollars have already been spent developing it despite the fact that there has been no practical usage of the network to date. It has been lauded for its unhackable security, though the researchers at Los Alamos are careful not to hype it too much.

"Nothing is perfectly secure -- not even the one-time pad," Hughes said.