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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."
I'm sure I'm not the only one who immediately thought "Titanic" when I saw the headline...
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?
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?
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
To describe anything as "unhackable", "perfect", "ultimate", etc. is to invite ridicule when you are proved wrong.
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.
Quantum cryptography most definitely is a form of cryptography. But this article has nothing to do with quantum cryptography.
Perhaps, but information encrypted with quantum cryptography is un-interceptable. Because of the way a one time pad works, you have no way to verify that you've cracked a message -- any "decrypted" result is the same as any other.
This is distinct from other encryption methods, which use complicated math to encrypt and decrypt things.
A one-time pad is merely a block of random data. You XOR your pad with your plaintext to get ciphertext. With a given ciphertext block, you have no way to verify what the correct plaintext is. For example, if I have a ciphertext message: ABCD, that could just as equally be the plaintext HELO as ROFL.
Quantum cryptography is the usage of quantum mechanisms to generate the same random data at two different locations. Because of properties of quantum physics that I don't personally understand, interception of that quantum data is impossible.
But no, quantum cryptography is not breakable because it's impossible to know whether you have the correct plaintext, and it's impossible to get the one-time pad from the quantum transmission line (physics guarantees it). In other encryption systems, you know mathematically whether you have discovered the "key". The ciphertext of a one-time-pad, according to information theory (and the assumption that your pad is made of truly random data), provides you absolutely no information about the pad or the plaintext.
See more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography
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 would be cautious about making claims as to what "physics" does and does not guarantee. "Physics" has guaranteed lots of things throughout history that it turns out to be "not quite right". Keep in mind that it took years before the majority of physicists agreed with Eistein's conclusions on relativity. Current experimentation my lead one to draw certain conclusions about the natural world, but the conclusions may not always be 100% correct.
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
You don't get funding grants by claiming your project outcome will be mediocre.
no, no such thing as "unhackable"
time and time again we've been shown this to be false.
it may take time/energy/effort etc but it's clearly possible. always.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
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.
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.
You know the transmission has to decyphered eventually if it's to be of any use to anyone. If someone eventually has to put the signal back in it's proper form then yes, yes it can be hacked. IF it can't be then the technology is completely useless in the first place.
actually, a MITM would be easy enough
It is possible, but not easy. The whole point is that each photon carries 2 bits of those data, and only one bit can be measured before the photon is destroyed. A middleman wouldn't know which of those two bits he needs to transmit. So he must guess, and half the time he gets it wrong, so the data is 50% corrupted, and the reciever knows something is very wrong.
However, if the middleman had previously broken into the reciever's office, he could've copied down the list of which bit on each photon is important, and then he could go back to the spy room and wait to run the attack on the next transmission.
(Of course, if the guy can break into the office, why doesn't he just steal disks while he's there?)
In light of the fact that we just found the "biggest compromise in history" of secure data was perpetrated by idiot employees selling peoples profiles for $10 (USD) a pop, I'm less worried about unhackable transmissions and more worried about the people at each end.
Lets remember to call our banks.
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)