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Using Diamonds to Create Unhackable Code
IAmTheDave writes "Researchers at Melbourne University have grown diamond particles 1/1000 of a millimetre on optical fibres which they can use to transmit single photons of light at a time. The diamonds are grown on the optical fiber by raining carbon molecules onto the tip of the fiber. They claim that by transmitting information in single photons, any interception of transmitted photons will be useless to the interceptor, and thus the message will be completely unhackable. Transmission speeds are currently slow - 120km/h, but are expected to speed up."
Jeeze.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Stretch 3000 miles of this across the atlantic, set up a secret recieving station on the African coast, and voila! One secret, untappable method for my world takeover, I mean, world communication plan!
This is far from an "unhackable code". In fact, it's not even a code. Please stop thinking that "quantum cryptography" is a form of cryptography. It's simply an interception-resistant media.
Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who immediately thought "Titanic" when I saw the headline...
So its really is true:
Diamond (encryptions) are forever!!
Buh wump dump.
(thanks. I will be here all week.)
Transmission speeds are currently slow - 120km/h, but are expected to speed up.
I'd guess this is due to the "lonely photon" effect, where an individual photon lacks the psychological energy to reach its goal in time.
You are no match for my kung-fu skills.
Transmission speeds are currently slow - 120km/h, but are expected to speed up
Don't the photons travel at the speed of light in the fiber? Perhaps it is some other unit?
Wouldn't the transmission speed have to be C? I mean, C isn't constant across all mediums, but even in quartz and ruby it's significanly faster than 120km/h.
I'm left wondering how it is they've managed to slow down the transmission of a photon to 120 kilometers in one hour, presumably in the glass fiber. Usually slowing down light that much takes a great deal of infrastructure and effort, it's rarely a side-effect.
Slashdot and the www.news.com.au couldn't have both made the same screamingly stupid mistake and meant 120 kilobits per hour, right? Right?
i think somethings burning
How useful will this be, really? Say you want to do some banking online. Even if you've replaced your Cat5 with diamond cable, you still need to go through other routers, providing multiple chances for people to intercept your transmissions. Unless everyone is going to install a diamond line from their homes to their bank, what use is this, really?
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
TFA says How? What keeps a third party between the two friends from receiving the photons transmitted by one friend and retransmitting exactly the same sequence of photons to the other while keeping a record, and therefore, a copy of the message?
I'm pretty sure there's more to it than appeared in TFA, and that there is a way to be sure there isn't an eavesdropper between the two friends, but I don't know what it is.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
The original fibre taps just spliced into the fibre and repeated the signals. It's only the later technology that could try to interpret the leakage. I don't see how this adds any security, except perhaps insofar as the time to make the more difficult splice will increase the odds of noticing the interruption. "Unhackable"? Nope. The race will never end.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Right now it's downright unusable, think the kind of fiber optic you would need so 1 photon can be recieved at the other end? perfectly straight..!
120km/h, just imagine the ping!!
That technology could be "secure" assuming there is a direct link, that means no routing at all. If there is any routing involved then you just killed the concept. There is always the chance that someone will just cut the cable and "snif" it.
Not a bad idea but right now it's far from promising...
I'll stick with my encryption...
Anyone want a game of quake? We could have like 1000 pings. It'll be like old times again!
I like muppets.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/08/03081 3070545.htm
The NIST (and many others) has been working with a bunch of other people on this for a while.
To describe anything as "unhackable", "perfect", "ultimate", etc. is to invite ridicule when you are proved wrong.
Eeeeh? Since when are data transmission speeds measured in kilometers per hour?
I mean, if they managed to slow light down to 120km/h i'm damn impressed and I think a nobel prize would be in order for these people.....
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
smells a little fishy if you ask me.
Not only is quantum cryptography not not a code or traditional cryptographic system, it is not exactly a perfectly "secure transmission medium" as some /.ers have suggested. It is a method of interception detection. It is a HARDWARE system that uses entanglement or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to send photons in such a way that the communication system itself can always detect eavesdropping (and logically would cease transmission if interception is detected). It is not untapable....but any taping would do little good since it would be noticed.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
I hope they don't speed the connection up, I hope they're able to slow it down! Think ultimate storage medium, the only limit being the number of photons you can put in the length of a pipe.
Running out of storage space? Hello sweet superposition! Yeah, my iPod stores 4.02 * 10^18 songs, but have to listen to them all in order.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
Finally we could answer that age old question:
If you're driving faster that the speed of light, and you turn you headlights on, what happens?
Such a system would still be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle exploits.
But what happens if you need to bend the diamond cables??
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
You would think that ordinary encryption would be much more than sufficient for anything less than the NSA.
...I cut this line then inserted a device that intercepted this signal and resent the exact same photon down the line to the recipient? How would they know?
Is it just me or it would seem that the reporter got something wrong in the story. I thought the only way to get a speed of light in the area of 120 km/h was through very cold temperature and Bose-Einstein condensate. Perhaps they meant the transmission if limited to 120 kbps or something?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Isn't that how RAM works? Once its set, it puts the signal out and sets itself again?
Maybe I'm a little off, but it sounds like how RAM works.
And why should they use this cable more than other cables for storage? Just use ethernet and send out the signal and keep getting it back and you could "store" as much data as the cable could hold. Unless of course this diamond cable is higher density of data.
Make your computer faster: rm -rf
Hookay, so, how are remote logins supposed to work?
Isn't the medium, however, solvent for a matrix in which to embed an unhackable codex? Seems to me that a medium (ie the diamond-tooled matrix envisioned here) presents a good (perhaps not perfect) medium whereby more foolproof algorhythms of the future might reside. Seems like a good step forward, if a marriage might be made.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. ~~ Hunter S. Thompson
So these are Canadian electrons, eh ?
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
People on earth are bored to hack data at this speed.
Yes and no. Quantum key exchange is, as you point out, a key negotiation protocol which relies on the laws of physics to keep the negotiated key safe from eavesdroppers. However, there's absolutely no limit on the size of key you can generate. If you need a million bits of key, then fine: make a million bit key.
Once you have as many bits of key as you have bits of data, you can treat it as a one-time pad. And that would be a perfectly secure transmission, as long as both sides make sure they destroy the key once it's been used to do an encryption or decryption operation.
In other words, QKE leads quite directly to (a) a cipher and (b) a traditional cryptographic system.
IAAGSSTS (I Am A Grad Student Studying This Shit).
120 km/h to send single photon in order to establish a secure channel?
Hmm.. let me get this straight. So if I burn a DVD and send it to California from New York using FedEx 2Day service for $14.59, could I name this post as "Unhackable Transmission Medium for only $14.59"?
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
I really don't think this tech is going anywhere.
The problem I have with this is that it really doesn't have any place in the internet at large. Sure, it's great for point to point direct connections--ie, my secure installation has a direct diamond-fibre connection to your secure installation, but it really doesn't do much for more public transfers, like internet banking.
This will secure transmissions between banks and internally at banks, but a secure system is only as secure as it's weakest link, and this doesn't improve security on the internet.
Since the internet uses routers, switches, and hubs someone could always gain access to the router or pickup the broadcast from a hub through some other means and cause that system to log packets or duplicate them elsewhere, etc.
Or is there a way to incorporate this into a system similar to the internet as we know it and make my home connection to my bank/paypal/yahoo shopping more secure?
This won't help much in terms of unbreakable encryption. If you can't intercept and break the crypto itself you can always break the fingers of someone who has the plaintext.
Even if you can't listen in, you can receive and retransmit.
I am no expert in the field of quantum cryptography, but i could imagine a sort of situation where the "man in the middle" captures all of the photons, before they are sent to the receiver, then calculates the required speed to make up for the latency and boosts the "signal" to prevent the reciever from knowing anything has gone wrong. Of course, I could be totally wrong...
University of Washington
Student
It's not that the code is unhackable, it's just that hackers won't be hacking into your bank account anymore. They'll just take the diamonds.
"to Create Unhackable Code"
I'll stop reading right about there.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
.... and rust. Name the artist, get a free phone call.
GetTheJob.com : Nothing but Real Jobs.
Unfortunatly that tends to let one of the parties know that the message is intercepted. Half of the use of decrypting others messages is that they don't know you are doing it.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Diamond tipped light wires? Sheesh. Thats so 1998.
Where are my flying cars damnit?!1!
I think that's bull. If the man in the middle cannot read the photons before altering them, how can the intended recipient? Explain it properly.
That has to be a typo. Even in diamond the speed of light is only a little about 2.5 times slower than in a vaccum. I'm very interested if the light is going 120 km/h in the optical cable though, because that would make it possible to theoretically build a time machine by winding the cable in a cylinder, but only if it retained that speed with more light in the cable. There is also the caveat that the metric this was solved for involved an infinitely long cylinder of rotating light, so it may not apply to finite cylinders.
what sig?
...we have getting into your car, driving to the individual you want to deliver the message to and telling them in person.
Can go faster than your data!
This is much more complicated than simply sharing one-time-pads. When any two idiots can burn 8GB of random data onto two DVD's and send secure text messages to each other for the rest of their lives, what the hell use is a complex physically secure network like this one? Anyone with enough money and need to buy one can find cheaper and more reliable means of secure communication.
Video Production Support
I prefer the older trick of "using diamonds" to "get my dick wet" - but, you can create unhackable code if you want. To each his own.
Is this the same crew that was cooling fibres down to near absolute zero, reducing the transmission speed to about 5m/s, and had the photons dribbling out the end forming a ...
Regarding the tech: someone could intercept the photon, and send a replacement copy in its place. Just like cloak and daggers intercepting a courier, photograph the papers, and send it on its way.
I don't want to sell you death sticks.
It's the University of Melbourne, idiot, not Melbourne University.
In quantum cryptography (which isn't quite what this article is about), there aren't any data lines to monitor -- the information is transmitted by entanglement. I know it sounds weird, but through entanglement you have a copy of whatever is going on in the other person's system without any data being sent. If you want to learn more about it, read up on the EPR paradox.
Quantum "encryption" is no better (or worse) than regular encryption. a simple oversight in the implementation can render you're algorithm breakable.
In my coursework classes I am taking for my PhD, we looked in-depth at the breaking of the enigma code, and these techniques are general: they apply to any code. The germans thought that by adding an extra rotor they were safe, and here we see history repeating itself. NO YOU ARE NOT SAFE BECAUSE YOU ARE USING PHOTONS! Start from the premise, "my message will be hacked" and work from there, it is the safest rout.
Adam J.
Ask me about freelance Java consulting.
Two questions: One, would it be possible to "detect" these signals via extremely sensitive magnetic equipment? After all, they are a charged particle, as such they would have (albeit very small) a charge. Two, wouldn't forming a "ring" of protons (any shape would work really), be much more efficient? You'd still know if it had been intercepted since the shape would differ from that of the original message.
If someone was going to intercept the message, couldn't they just read the photon and then retransmit it? Duh, how unbreakable it that?
I suspect they mean 120km/h, because of repeaters along the fibre must be more complex than usual for this application.
Adam J.
Ask me about freelance Java consulting.
I wonder if you could use this as a huge batterey? Store up enough photons in a circle, then tap into them as needed.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
There once was such a thing as electroacoustic memory - a mercury cylinder with a piezo element at both ends, one to "write" and the other to "read".
DRAM chips use a grid pattern where a memory address simply specifies which column/row to read/write. This grid is built off tiny capacitors which slowly self-discharge by leakage currents, this is why DRAM requires refresh cycles. Also, the DRAM cells are read by connecting these femto-capacitors to internal bus lines. Those bus lines have capacitance of roughly the same scale as the cells' so DRAMs are "destructive read" devices. These buses terminate into line amplifiers, during a read operation, the amplifiers drive a row register and once the read cycle is done, the DRAM chip usually initiates a write cycle to rewrite the original data into the partially discharged cells. This internal read/write operation is the same as a refresh and before DRAM chips started featuring self-refresh, refresh was carried out by doing a dummy read operation for each DRAM row address.
I blame the media for creating these scientific promises that we can never live up to. Science isn't a process of one great discovery that solves all the worlds problems (or all the cryptographers problems). It is a long hard grind with small rewards along the way. Just like everything else.
sounds just like the Mercury delay line memory from the old days. Where they used sound pulses travelling in the mercury to represent presence or abscence of bits...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
They are using photons, not protons.
Nothing is truely random.
Except for.. well, bloody everything at the quantum level. Unentangled particles store "one bit" - if you read say, the position, the velocity is truly random (within certain bounds, on a given distribution function). Entangled particle pairs store "two bits" - you can measure two velocities, a velocity and a position, or two positions - but everything else that you measure will be random (as described before)
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
One of my professors I guess did something right (who would have guessed). He needed to store an encryption/decryption key that could be used by a computer, however there had to be zero way to recover the code if the computer was stolen (of course the computer must still retain the information if it's turned off). The solution? Create a wire and send the code on it. The wire returns to the source at which point the received data is echoed back out using a battery. If anything even slightly disrupts this process the data becomes corrupted instantly before the signal can possibly be read. I don't see any reason this same strategy can't be used.
So, use the 'two slot' interference phenomenon as an example: It may be possible to use diffraction methods to read the photon beam. I won't put much money on this transmission method, until there has been lots of peer review.
And what happens when some idiot breaks your fibre? Isn't it expensive enough to repair modern fibre communications? Now someone thinks it's a good idea to make you replace the complete 'wire'?
Luke-Jr
The 'man in the middle' attack always has a way to work. Always always always always. You can set up your encryption so that he would have to capture multiple channels, but there is always a way to do a 'man in the middle' attack.
AC: In quantum cryptography (which isn't quite what this article is about), there aren't any data lines to monitor -- the information is transmitted by entanglement.
No, your definitions are off. "Quantum Cryptography" is the use of Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle's guarantee that the whole state of a particle cannot be measured to ensure that a message cannot be intercepted and retransmitted.
The use of quantum entanglement to communicate data has also been proposed, but this is known as Quantum Teleportation. QT, not QC.
Do they not teach you Americans basic quantum physics at school?
Measuring something changes it. Therefore you can't just splice in a repeater into the middle of the fibre, because the act of receiving the photon changes the exact quantum state of what is eventually received the other end. Normal repeaters only work due to them a) not caring so much about the exact quantum state and b) having $FSCKLOADS of particles to work with.
QC is a problem in search of a solution.
Invert.
Diamonds are a programmer's best friends! ;)
I had this largish thing describing what I thought of this relativly cool technology and my reticence in buying into it as the "Next Big Thing(tm)" but I think I can sum it up like this:
"All your diamond are belong to us" -- lopht
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Section 2.1 covers the limitations of quantum key distribution (QKD) as per his proof; other proofs for other situations have been made, but this is about as general as I was able to find.
And faster.
steal the exchange of the otp over some insecure due to implimentation chan.
He's obviously trying to confuse the debate with "facts" and "relevant experience". Geezsh, the things people try on /. these days...
Just kidding, of course. Thanks for the useful info!
We should all be able to hack away at something if we acquire that device learning whatever we can about it. IMO, while referring to cyphers, secure communication and cryptography we should be using "crack" as the more appropriate term. Dunno if it's too dumb to say this, but seemingyl sets terminology to the right category. The other term I could think of was "reverse-engineering-proof" though that too doesn't seem appropriate. (Just a thought.)
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)
"But our technique exploits quantum mechanics. This allows you to communicate in total secrecy, with unhackable codes."
I swear I have seen this on slashdot circa 2000 and they claimed much the same thing using fiber. What ever happened to them?
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
When any two idiots can burn 8GB of random data onto two DVD's and send secure text messages to each other for the rest of their lives, what the hell use is a complex physically secure network like this one?
Copying data from a DVD that you've intercepted or otherwise gained access to isn't hard. Once you've done that you can not only read any new messages they send, you can decode all the old messages you've already intercepted. And they have no way of knowing you've stolen the pad.
Now the providers will be able to prevent their customers from sharing their broadband connection.
Well, let's see.
If you put an inline device that intercepted a photon and rebroadcast it, then:
1. You would have all the info you needed
2. They wouldn't detect it.
I must be missing something.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It just relies on a perpetual motion device to power the division by zero generator.
You call him Doctor Jones, doll!
What was that anti-music-stealing tax again ? - No one (in holland) could afford such an ipod. ;)
Quantum encryption is safe to call unhackable because to break it would literally require violating physical laws.
So would you say that quantum physics is God's DMCA?
has already cracked it. With a Sharpie.
All arguments about the workings of quantum encryption can refer to this paper. One key assumption is that you only send a single photon, not two or none. If none arives you wasted that bit-slot, but a second photon allows eavesdropping. Traditional sources generate photons according to Poisson statistics, which means that you can't accurately meter out one photon at a time. The standard fix for this is to attenuate the signal so that the average N is much less than 1 photons per measurement slot. This effectively means you only get (roughly) a photon every 1/N slots, but you still get 2 arriving together every 1/N^2 slot. The first part is both wastful, the second vulnerable.
The current paper merely how to generate single photons more reliably using diamonds as microcavities. Essentially the diamond is a tiny laser resonator on the scale of a single wavelength (1 micron), and can only support one optical mode, so any single spontaneously generated photon goes into that mode, and your output is single, narrow wavelength photon, but no doubles. In some ways this has ceased to be a "L.A.S.E.R." since the Light is not Amplified, and the Emmision of Radiation is not Stimulated, but spontaneous. Maybe I would call it Light Organized from Spontaneous Emission of Radiation, but I digress...
If you wat to look at such microcavities, see this paper
"I love his boyish charm, but I hate his childishness" - Leela
Listen, if the intended receiver is able to pick up the signal, then a man in the middle can, too!
QC relies on two communications pathways - one conventional to say "keep/don't keep this bit", and the other uses quantum effects so that the bits can only be read once.
If you completely capture both communication lines, then you can impersonate the receiver, and then duplicate the signal and impersonate the sender.
I'm not talking about observing the bits that go down the line. I'm talking about impersonating both sides to each other. That is a man in the middle attack.
One way you can make MitM harder is to have many many communications pathways. For example, imagine if your protocol involved sending 20 streams that must all be XORed together to get the cleartext. An attacker must capture all the pathways to be successful.
The other way to make MitM harder is to have a big enough shared secret. You could have secret passwords, or even a secret protocol would work too. If the MitM can't guess the shared secret, then impersonation will fail.
Some people have proposed a way of quantum key generation via entangled particles. But remember that getting this shared secret to each other is also subject to MitM attacks. Someone can yoink those entangled particles, and throw in new ones. Then when you communicate later on, he just decrypts with one key and then re-encrypts with the other.
You can make it very impractical for an attacker to succeed, even so hard that no known human would have the resources to pull it off. But who knows - you still have no absolute guarantee.
The person you're talking to can always be an impersonator. It can be really improbable, but there is always some possibility. I'm not saying you should be paranoid, but just that every communication involves a degree of trust. Quantum magic won't make that required trust go away.
It is not random, you just cannot know what it is. And, following, if you don't know what it is, you can't say that it's random, for all you know it could be perfectly sequential.
Video Production Support
Transmission speeds are currently slow - 120km/h, but are expected to speed up.
Anyone else read this and think... they just transted the diamonds in the back of a car.
'Never under estimate the bandwidth of a truck loaded up with backup tapes'
"Who's been fucking with my photon!"
Aha. But I was hiding in the bushes and observed your rat and can tell you that your rat was a Blue Agouti that was about four inches long. And you didn't even know.
QC can offer the opportunity for me to know whether my transmission is being eavesdropped upon. Can your rat-throwing protocol?
BTW--sending secret messages is not always about the speed. In fact, plenty of covert channels take days or weeks to transmit a secret message. It's not always about a lot of data sent very quickly.
Okay so when is security though obscurity, here simply a covert channel provide unhackable code? This is retarded. It just makes it harder it does not make it secure.
From TFA: If it's intercepted, no useable information is gleaned
...and as many have pointed out, observing the photons will change the photon's state, making the message unreadable to the receiver.
There won't be much demand for a transmission technology when the data is rendered unusable just because someone looked at the cable.
And don't forget Teslacles Deviant to Fudd's Law: "If it goes in, it must come out."
Program Intellivision!
No, it is not sequential. It is determined by the universe itself, and is, by all experimentation thusfar, one hundred percent truely random within a given distribution function.
Dear Lord: One of your creatures may be hurt tonight. Please let it be the other creature.
Most people are confused with the terms. Man-in-the-middle is not an eavesdropper. Or in other terms an eavesdropper is not really a man-in-the-middle.
Man-in-the-middlechanges the information between the two parties, this is the key point. It talks to the sender and the receiver differently.
So preventing eavesdropping does not necessarily means that preventing man-in-the-middle attacks.
I didn't actually study QKD but what I have read so far in this post showed that QC only prevents eavesdropping.
It is good that somebody already mentioned this. Most people are confused with the terms.But it is better to stress again.
Man-in-the-middle is not an eavesdropper. Or in other terms an eavesdropper is not really a man-in-the-middle.
Man-in-the-middlechanges the information between the two parties, this is the key point. It talks to the sender and the receiver differently.
So preventing eavesdropping does not necessarily means that preventing man-in-the-middle attacks.
I didn't actually study QKD but what I have read so far in this post showed that QC only prevents eavesdropping.
How does the other side know what bits it is supposed to get?
If sender X can send any message, then how does recipient Y know that the message should have contained some set number of 1s and 0s.
You could not, as a Spy S, intercept X's message, examine it, then resend it, without Y knowing that the message changed. But could you not still completely block X's message, then, simply send another one with the same "pattern" that Y knows about?
This is my sig.
I know nothing really about all this quantum whatever...so im probably embarresing myself by so much as making a comment on this. But im sure that with the hundereds of thousands of nerds, geeks and hackers in this world, that they are ever going to create something that is completely unhackable!! If they cant intercept it in the middle of the transmission and get the data they want out of it...then they will find another way to get hold of that data! There is always a back door overlooked and left not fully protected that some hacker will find their way into. I dont believe that there will ever be a fully un-hackable system!
Life is something we live to pass the time between life and death....useless
nope, it's definetly random.
It's called the heisenberg uncertainty principle.
dx * dp = h/2pi
dx = uncertainty in position
dp = uncertainty in momentum
h = plancks constant.
If public channels are so guaranteed as you seem to think, then there is a way around MitM even without any quantum stuff.
uncertainty != random. READ YOUR PARENT