Slashdot Mirror
Quantum Cryptography Gets Nanotube Boost
c1ay writes "In an article at the ScienceDaily News it is reported that two researchers at the University of Rochester have discovered a new property of carbon nanotubes, ideal photon emission. "The emission bandwidth is as narrow as you can get at room temperature," says Lukas Novotny, professor of optics at Rochester and co-author of the study. Such a narrow and steady emission can make such fields as quantum cryptography and single-molecule sensors a practical reality. RSA and Elliptic Curve wouldn't stand a chance against this unbreakable encryption."
A one time pad is 'unbreakable'
I bootleg Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
Troll?
Of course you can't brute force a one-time pad, not usefully. Each key is equally likely, and you never know if your "decrypted" message is the correct one.
This assumes, of course, that the key is truly random.
So-called "quantum encryption" may be unbreakable, but it is ignorant to portray it as a competitor to something like RSA. Quantum encrypton is a link-layer technique - something one would use to prevent eavesdropping on a single fibre hop (which is hardly a problem anyway).
Worse, it is hardly practical for real networks anyway - with routers, repeaters, EBFAs or Raman amps everywhere. If it ever makes it out of the lab, it may be useful for military systems (where money is no object), but it won't help you pirate music anonymously.
RSA and elliptic curve are able to provide encryption safe from a man in the middle attack, as well as authentication of where a message came from (signing). This is far ahead of what quantum encryption offers.
The only security quantum encyption has is that the message can only be read by one viewer - this prevents covert surveillance of the message, but not a man in the middle attack, nor a total interception.
Pragmatically you bundle quantum encryption with other authentication techniques, but RSA on it's own is far more useful and secure than quantum encryption on its own.
It's not time to throw RSA and Elliptic curve out just yet.
And crackers don't really stand a chance against the algorithms we have now. Although I'm happy to see them inventing cool stuff and cryptography os definitely neat, will this makes us more secure? Sure computers keep getting better and you need to stay ahead of the curve if you are someone like the NSA, but are people the loosing the security game because their 128 bit RSA keys keep getting cracked ? No. They are insecure because they have nanotube-size brains and use their birthday for their password or they leave a laptop with the vice president's agenda at a convenience store.
What we normally mean by "encryption" is "the transformation of readable stuff into stuff that can be seen by evil people without them able to understand anything". Encrypted data are a stream of bits just like anything else. Thus you can store your encrypted message on a disk, or write it down, or transmit it over a wire, or broadcast it.
In this sense "quantum encryption" isn't encryption at all. Quantum encryption is something that can only happen as part of the act of transmission. There is no such thing as "quantum-encrypted data" that can be recorded or written down or transmitted over conventional media. The act of doing any of those things collapses the wave packet and destroys communication just as effectively as interception would.
I'm not going to argue that we should start calling quantum encryption something else, the name is too snappy and too useful for getting research grants, but let's not get confused into comparing it with public-key or even private-key encryption: they're completely different animals.
Now we are one step closer to giving people the false impression that they can be idiots with their data because this particular magic bullet (QC) will be completely secure.
"if you brute force with all combinations, one will give the plaintext...so in a sense you have cracked the code."
Yeah, it cracks me up that a larger portion of sd will reply with statistical assumptions based on textual logic, when finding useful information in collected in encrypted streams (disected by best guesses with 'fun in bruting') is more like looking for a rainbow in an Irish field, rather than looking for genetic sequences in a massive punnett square. It seems even smart people have a problem removing their obvservation from strict learned logic. oh well. Let's hope an increased reading rate (that which our children are now recieving, partly in thanks to new pda/cellies) will bring abstract notions into vogue once more.
Our language is full of rules that are overly simplified, which makes it much much easier to recognize a pattern for an observing human once one falls into or nearly into place. Math, thankfully, is not a new subject.. the tricks are plentiful. Too bad most people aren't patient enough to sit and watch outputs for long periods of time, anymore.
oh well, once again..
pm
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Some repetition is a feature of randomness - as the string of random numbers gets larger, is beomes more and more likely that there will be a repetition somewhere. A very long string of numbers in which no sequence was repeated would be astronomically unlikely, and therefore not 'really' random.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
The numbers HAVE to repeat - you've only got two digits to play with! The point is that the SEQUENCE cannot repeat itself. Or otherwise be predicted from earlier parts of the sequence.
No. It's absolutely, completely impossible. Brute force cannot be implemented against it, because any key that decrypts the ciphertext to a valid credit card number is as likely as any other. As you change the key, you'll get perfectly valid decryptions to every possible credit card number.
I strongly suspect your random number generator is flawed. There is way too much repetition. 12 letters come in pairs, out of a total of 16 letters. 8 out of 16 letters are on the top row of a qwerty keyboard. Also, 5 out of 10 unique letters are on the top row of the keyboard. There are a few other patterns, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Everything you have been able to deduce has been based on the statement that the string is an encypted credit card number. Applying these rules to the string would bring you no closer to determining what the number was other than it was a credit card number which is what was stated in the first place
Heck, you can't even tell if he was lying about it being a credit card number.
That's the thing about one-time pads.
Rich