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EU To Counter Echelon With Quantum Cryptography?
jfruhlinger writes "An article on Security.ITWorld.com seems to outline a coming information arms race. The European Union has decided to respond to the Echelon project by funding research into supposedly unbreakable quantum cryptography that will keep EU data out of Echelon's maw. Leaving aside the question of whether such a thing is possible, the political implications are troubling, indicating a widening rift within the Western world. Interestingly, the UK is part of the EU, but its intelligence services are among Echelon's sponsors."
Hence, if you really want to gripe about the name, I suppose you could call it quantum key distribution.
Sigh.. OK, it's a troll, but someone has to bite.
a. Quantum crypto is invulnerable to a monkey-in-the-middle attack. Poorly implemented SSL is vulnerable to MITM during key exchange.
2. It is widely accepted lore on the Internet, and strongly suspected by respectable people, that there exist quantum computing devices capable of factoring extremely large numbers. If this is true, any form of public-key crypto goes to shit.
iii. Part of the problem with cryptography is that it does nothing to hide the source and destination of the data exchange. In theory, a secure quantum crypto system can't be tapped in the first place, so in theory, sender and reciever are anyonymous.
IV. H.323 is for godless commies.
Australia admitted the existence of Echelon, and it's part in the global surveilance network some years ago. The reason? The US demanded access to all data from Australia, whereas Australia wanted to remove the names of Australian citizens and businesses not under investigation. They would provide the details when asked, just not up front, to protect against the US using the info for corporate espionage. The Australians refused, the US said "Oh yeah, what are you gonna do?" and the Aussies responded, "Tell the world."
Here's a link, but you can google 'echelon australia' for more info
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I think they chose that particular language because it had unique properties that made de-cyphering the language almost impossible. I'm not sure if they applied any additional encryption
The Navajo Code Talkers. They didn't apply additional encryption per say but they had an interesting encoding scheme:
You can also assume that they encoded the messages using standard military/common-sense methods -- i.e: referring to waypoints on a map that your enemy doesn't have access to. If he knows that you are going to attack at "Point Echo" but he doesn't know where that is the information is of limited use to him -- by the time he figures out where Point Echo is the information is out of date and it doesn't matter that he knows it.
In any case the code talkers are an interesting (often ignored) fact of WW2, the recent movie notwithstanding. An interesting subject to read up on sometime.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The weakness in current encryption/communications systems isn't in the encrypting algorithms, which have withstood the serious efforts of some top-flight mathematicians to bust them. Nor is it necessarily in traffic analysis; keep a line open and transmitting bits 24/7. Isn't hard to design the system so the intended recipient can tell when the "random" bits start a message. Nor is the weakness in key transmission, at least for governments: lots and lots of really long keys can be transported on CDs well in advance of need. The weakness remains where it has been in recent years, with the people using the system, and with keeping their computers out of unauthorized hands. Going to quantum methods doesn't change get around this weakness. From what I see, the benefit of quantum crypto is the ability to make message tampering evident.