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Single-Photon LED: Key To Uncrackable Encryption?
nut writes: "The BBC are carrying this story of new type of LED so precise that it can emit just one photon of light each time it is switched on. It has been developed by scientists from Toshiba Research Limited and the University of Cambridge. It is described in the journal Science, although I can find no mention of it on their website. One of the applications of this is supposedly uncrackable encryption, due to the law of indeterminacy. This application is described fully in 'The Code Book', by Simon Singh, although the method was only theoretical at the time the book was first published."
The application refers to its use in quantum cryptography. It doesn't render the encryption process uncrackable, but makes it able to detect that someone is eavesdropping and/or has broken the encryption. With current methods, you can't tell if someone has broken your key and read your message. Using quantum cryptography, you can tell when someone has read your message.
(It all goes along the lines of you can't observe something without changing it. If someone along the way intercepts the message and observes it, they will change the message and you can detect THAT on the other end.)
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
Now just imagine the ramifications of allowing secure encryption! What if Osama bin Laden had one of these terminals hooked up in his cave? Instead of using letters and his international installation of terrorists to securely transmit instructions face-to-face, he could have IM'd them! We MUST stop this trend towards privacy and technological innovation if we are going to continue to lead the world in human rights and technological innovations into the future!
If a corporation is a personhood, is owning stock slavery?
This application is described fully in 'The Code Book', by Simon Singh, although the method was only theoretical at the time the book was first published."
Uhm... I believe this is wrong. The book was issued in 1999, and it contains this sentence in chapter 8:
Moreover, one paragraph further we see:
One of us is wrong -- either I'm reading this from an edited version of "the Code Book", although nowhere does it say "second edition", or the original poster needs to re-check his facts.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
I have no desire to keep on kooking. :-) That I am utterly convinced of something I cannot adequately argue is driving me *hard* to learn the necessary physics to address the topic reasonably.
:-)
:-)
But I'll do a braindump, if only to see your reaction. Warning: Unbridled speculation based off a single plausible postulate follows.
It's an interesting corrolary from crypto research that you can never be entirely sure a data source is truly entropic, as opposed to the output of even an adequately designed pseudo-random number generator. (Take a look at RC4 -- something that takes that little code to implement could certainly exist as a style of equation for atomic and subatomic scale apparently entropic output.)
Knowing that one of the least understood but most significant errors in cryptography would be utterly unknown in any other field of research lends some credence to my thinking that at least some supposedly entropic processes are really pseudoentropic. It's not that I think physics people are "morons", like one person mailed me. By the contrary, they're some of the brightest people around. I just think they're underestimating the degree to which psuedoentropy, defined as a stream of "provably random" data derived from a single seed value, can mask actual entropy. GIGO, and all that.
That being said, that I'm only slightly familiar with the apparently disproved "hidden numbers" theory that believes it directly addresses this line of thought has given me a great deal of humility. My hope is that the argument against hidden numbers tends to focus on easily detectable randomizers and is overapplied to higher level processes.
Both Quantum Intrusion Detection and Quantum Entanglement, of course, make quite a bit of sense with a PRNG in place. Of course two particles can get entangled; if both can be forged with the same seed, they'll vary with exactly matched entropy. (We use this exact property when we use RC4 as an encryption system: By XORing against matched entropy, a sender can transmit to a receiver using what is indistinguishable from pure noise to anyone without the seed value.) But what would the "seed" be? Surely not position and velocity, even if it is tempting to discretize by Planck Length. I nominate direction, defined as degree of relative dimensional translation, but then I don't have much of a place to nominate anything
Whatever the seed value might be, once two particles match in any way, any subsequent measurements of both relative to eachother would tend to be uncomfortably related, even if analyzing each bitstream directly would evidence perfect entropy. And that's what we find from what little I know about the entanglement experiments. (Why yes, I'm throwing doubt on my own words to prevent other people from kooking out on my own gnawing musings.)
As for Quantum Intrusion Detection, a correction that makes perfect sense, the presumption is that it's impossible to duplicate the seed values that give rise to the sender/receiver relationships. But entanglement is all about duplication of seed values, as for that matter is photon transmission through a non-vacuum. You can't hide the fact that states are related by simply saying that entanglement implies "states may change". Spins aren't just changing; they're changing in a manner predictable to one another. If that's possible, it's difficult to out-of-hand conclude that a supposedly intrusion-proof photon couldn't itself be split, and have its entangled partner measured upon the original having its state set. You could claim the newly split pair couldn't possibly have the same seed value -- but that's more of a technological challenge than anything else. Especially if direction is a seed value, four ninety-degree bounces would equalize direction.
There's other stuff on my mind(most notably, some annoyance with the anthropomorphized concept of "observation" and "measurement" that could be abused to presume that the "observation" of dinosaur bones sent a signal sixty-five million years previous to establish the birth and death of dinosaurs in general and that specimen in particular), but I think I'll stop playing public kook for now.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com