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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."
What I do is send meaningless emails with high encryption to my friends in China. I figure that the NSA may as well spend countless CPU cycles finding out that I just installed the Guild Wars E3 demo rather then on important stuff.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
In other news, a significant minority of people in the EU have already switched to an unbreakable real-time encryption technology, transmissible through the open air. External experts are at a loss; the NSA has made no headway whatsoever against this new threat.
What is it? It goes by the name 'French'...
Interestingly, the UK is part of the EU, but its intelligence services are among Echelon's sponsors.
The UK has its butt sitting on 2 chairs. On one hand they sort of behave like a US state, with Tony as governor, and on the other as a half-willing EU member, in large part thanks to Mrs Thatcher. One of these days they'll have to decide which continent they want to be part of.
And I have a feeling that, if the population has a say, they'll embrace the EU eventually. Of course, the population rarely has a true say in any country though...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
If there is a "growing rift" in the Western hemisphere, who the fuck do you think is responsible for this -- the ones who are pissed off about the eavesdropping and are trying to do something to stop it (and think for a moment about the fact that they're trying encryption rather than attempting to convince the US et al. that it's a Bad Thing...what does that tell you about their chances of actually convincing anyone to stop anything?), or the countries and intelligence agencies that decided this was acceptable in the first place?
Sorry for the shouting, but this intellectual coyness does not become you.
Carousel is a lie!
Also, I don't think people realize how strong cryptography is today. There are cryptographic methods available to the public at large (such as RC5 and PGP) that are proven to require more computing power than is theoretically possible in the universe. Not just more computing power than is possible with current hardware, but the theoretical limits of computation given the entire resources of the universe. So really, it seems that a lot of ignorance is at play here, and I would hope someone clueful in the EU informs their EU government before they go off and waste a whole lot of taxpayer money on such a foolish project.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
As someone who lives in the UK, I think our stance on this is ridiculous, and a legacy of WW2. We're an important and influential member of the EU, and the last couple of years should have made it obvious that a close relationship with the US damages our relationship with the rest of Europe (and the wider world) and only benefits the Americans. In the post Empire world, Britain's role is as a democratic and decent European nation. We should not support pre-emptive war or the Israeli's mistreatment of the native Palestinians.
Oi, Blair! Sort it out.
Hence, if you really want to gripe about the name, I suppose you could call it quantum key distribution.
True, it can't possibly be disturbing that the EU does not want the US spying on them after the US misused the trust completely during incidents like the Airbus/Boeing scandal.
You can't possibly question the motives of a country trying to protect against spies from friendly countries, when those friendly countries actually ARE spying on them.
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.
If you don't consider Quantum Physics evil, you've definitely never been in a technical university.
theefer
In regards the US experience:
WWI - the Belgian mistreatment was deplorable, but what drove the US into this war was the unrestricted submarine warfare and such stupidity as the Zimmermann note. There were no mutual interests really - Wilson tried to be almost quaintly fair in his peace terms which were summarily rejected by the rest of the Allies with their millions of corpses. Wilson came back, had his stroke, and that was it for internationalism in the US. Back to sleep...
WWII - We stayed out of the war for three years. I'm not going to say there was no sympathy for Britain, but there was no desire to get embroiled in a war anywhere. Even the sinking of US ships in the North Atlantic was insufficient: it required the attack at Pearl Harbor to drive us to war. Even then, there was no real solidarity with Europe. There was a job to be done, an danger to be eradicated. We did this, and formed the UN in an attempt to deter future war. Based upon formulae agreed upon at Yalta and elsewhere, we occupied the former Axis and maintained some troop strength there, which would not previously have been a normal American thing to do.
Cold War - The Cold War was once again fed by fear of Soviet aggression rather than any kind of solidarity with Europe. We assumed that fighting the Communists would be better done in Europe than on our own shores.
Now, please note that these events were similarly perceived elsewhere -i'm sure no British patriot thinks that us taking a pass on WWII for 3 years while they got pounded was a good idea, for instance.
My point simply is that US interests are not congruent with those of Europe and very likely never will be. Immediacy of threats has masked this for a long time , but it should not be mistaken. There never has been any kumbaya singing going on at either side of the Atlantic.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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
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.
Perhaps, but then again, how many respected Nazi researchers believed that the allies had cracked the Enigma code?
It was not unreasonable for them to have suspected so. The integrity of Enigma relied heavily on keeping the machines and codebooks out of allied hands - had the Germans known that the allies had managed to get ahold of those things, the impressive effort of Turing & co. to go the last bit would not have been inconceivable to his German counterparts.
If the NSA can really crack any of our modern cryptographical methods, then they are at least forty fifty years ahead of the rest of world in both mathematics and computing. Is that conceivable? And if they are, then they can't really do anything with what they find anyways, since they would have to spend most of their energy keeping the secret.
Basically you are trying to score cheap points (read karma) but making a comparison that doesn't hold, but that plays on peoples emotions. It's the equivalent of responding to any comment advocating avoiding war with: "That's what Chamberlain thought."
I remember over a decade ago when I actually worked in a business in which we were espionage aware, that the number one espionage problem in the US was the French (followed by the Chinese, and then a laundry list of European countries -- including the UK), the French being primarily interested in stealing US weapons technology and listening in on business deals they were competing with. Which was primarily a business move; along with the Russians and the US, the French are one of the world's major arms exporting countries and they have to compete with US designed weapons on the open market.
Everyone spies on everyone, and for varying reasons. The French actually used to have one of the most aggressive intelligence services on the globe, disproportionate to their size and geopolitical importance, which some people find surprising. I don't know if it as large today, though. But this is nothing new, and all the governments understand that this goes on. As long as it doesn't get out of hand, it is tolerated between countries that are nominally friendly.