Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Quantum Cryptography In Action

Posted by timothy on from the you-can't-see-me dept.

Whitney Wyatt writes: "Discover magazine outlines the first successful laser photon communication utilizing Quantum Cryptography. Called 'Perfect Encryption,' quantum encryption sends the key with the message, however it is impossible for an eavesdropper to intercept the message without changing it. One can only wonder what the FBI will do."

1 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Perfect encryption already exists... by mindstrm · · Score: 5, Informative

    With a one-time pad. Like he just said.

    Say you have 1kb you need to encrypt.

    You generate a 1kb key, and do a simple XOR.

    Then you take the key, and the resulting 'encrypted' file, and send them on their merry way. Only when the two are placed together can the original data be recovered.

    So as long as nobody obtains the original key, the data is uncrackable. You can't brute force it, because the keyspace is the size of the data itself. Brute forcing it would simply mean generating every single combination of 1k data fields and guessing which one was the original.

    Make sense?