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Secure Video Conferencing via Quantum Cryptography
Roland Piquepaille writes "If you use a webcam to talk with your mom, this tool is not for you. But if you're working for a company and that you have to routinely discuss about sensitive future projects or the possible acquisition of another company, you need more security, and this new video conferencing system based on quantum cryptography is a tool you need. According to this article from Nature, researchers from Toshiba have developed a system which can generate 100 quantum 'keys' every second, fast enough to protect every frame in a video exchange. This technology, which today is working over a distance of about 120 kilometers, could become commercially available within two years at an initial cost of $20,000. This overview contains more details and references."
Maybe this "tool" isn't for having a chat with mom, but if you plan on making a Star Wars like lightsaber duel with a broom, make sure to use this.
Secure Video Conferencing via Quantum Cryptography
If you use a webcam to talk with your mom, this tool is not for you. But if you're working for a company and that you have to routinely discuss about sensitive future projects or the possible acquisition of another company, you need more security, and this new video conferencing system based on quantum cryptography is a tool you need. According to this article from Nature, researchers from Toshiba have developed a system which can generate 100 quantum 'keys' every second, fast enough to protect every frame in a video exchange. This technology, which today is working over a distance of about 120 kilometers, could become commercially available within two years at an initial cost of $20,000. Read more...
Here is the introduction from Nature.
Of course, today's videoconferencing tools using conventional encryption are already pretty secure. But if the NSA wants to check your conversation, I betit can. With quantum cryptography, this is a different story.
The Quantum Information Group at Toshiba gives more details on this subject on this page about Security from Eavesdropping . Below is a diagram illustrating the concept (Credit: Toshiba's Cambridge Research Laboratory).
The first commercial applications of quantum cryptography are now about one year old. However, this new system offers new levels of performances, according to Nature.
Toshiba has already built a Quantum Cryptography Prot
I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.
Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers".
Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now let's talk about money. Visit BlogAds to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at Network Solutions ). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced ( link ) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each month. Keeping your website registered with Network Solutions cost $34.99 per year, or about $3 per month. This leaves Roland Piquepaille with $647 each month. He may pay for additional services related to his online journal, but I was unable to find any evidence of this.
All of the above are cold, hard, verifiable facts, except where stated otherwise. Now I will give you my personal opinion
video conferencing.. the politically correct way to say, streaming porn
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
I'm still trying to figure out why anyone would want to spend the cash on this when they could just tunnel through SSH, use a VPN, etc... etc...
Sure, it might use slightly more bandwidth than this, but come on, for that price....
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
New encryption tools are cool, but they only secure the network. The end-terminals (and end-users) are still insecure. Holes in the OS, clicking on the wrong email, etc. can compromise one of the machines. And if either party likes chocolate, then we know that we can get the keys to crypto just by offering a tasty morsel.
Security is only as strong as its weakest link. This invention ensures that the network is not the weakest link. Its a step in the right direction, but other components are still pretty vulnerable.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Interesting. Quantum cryptography is supposed to be 'hack proof'. So, why the need for 100 keys per second? One key at the start of the stream should be enough. If your video gets scrambled, it tells you that you have an infrastructure problem, or someone is actively trying to hack into your stream. Either way, continuing the conversation seems kinda moot.
:)
Perhaps this is a 'just because we can' technology which ignores the 'should we?' question. (or, I lack the vision to see how this is useful
eskwayrd = m^2c^4
For this to be really useful, you would need to be able to send the photons via satellite, something which is hard as the interaction with the environment along the way can destroy the entangled state. This would probably be interpreted the same as eavesdropping, further muddling the water. Physicists are indeed trying to get this to work, but it may take some time.
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
because his "articles" sure read like them, check out a google search on this phrase
This overview contains more details and references
perhaps Roland should spend his time and get a proper job (or perhaps nobody will employ him) and actually contribute something new to the internet instead of just leeching from others hard work.
Yes, offtopic, I know. Moving on.
There are a lot of us here who object to Roland Piquepaille's well-documented practice of using Slashdot to direct readers to his site and thereby generate ad revenue for himself.
Roland Piquepaille contributes none of his own work (it's ALL derivative of others' efforts), and Slashdot is more than willing to sell their readers out to this character.
So the next time a Roland Piquepaille-submitted story comes up, don't read it. Don't post replies. Don't even acknowledge that the story is there.
It's time we send Slashdot the message that we don't like being taken advantage of in this manner.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
What they are doing here is encrypting each frame with a different key where the key is sent using quantum states so that any eaves dropping will be discovered. Their stated reason is that decrypting each frame is much more difficult than if the entire stream was encrypted with a single key.
Basically what they are saying is their system has several thousand keys instead of just one. But that does not make the underlying transmission any more secure. If it is possible to brute force one key, it is possible to brute force many keys.
All they are doing is making it less pratical to use a brute force attack. I'd classify this as being closer to a "security through obscurity" technique rather than a real advancement.
Now if they sent the entire data stream using quatum bits, that would be something different.
From the article:
Single photons do not split, so if the hacker (Eve) measures the photons on the fibre, they will not reach the intended recipient (Bob).
IIRC, "Oscar" was the traditional (wo)man-in-the-middle. If this new "Eve" is hot, she can have all the photons she wants.
This sig rocks the casbah.
I don't see this as being really practical for security. So you've got all of this quantum-encrypted video which is infinitely better than an SSH-encrypted stream and you're feeling pretty smug about how unbreakable it is. Meanwhile, the janitor has planted a bug under your desk and is eavesdropping on everything you say. Or someone else hid a pinhole camera in a plant and is recording it all.
While I applaud the research and find the technology cool, I don't think a lack of decent encryption technology is the weakest link with regards to security.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Three words: Remote Military Applications. The benefits of this technology to the military stretch far beyond normal and even ultra secret communications; they could remotely control battle robots, or even properly equipped tanks, without fear of interference or subversion. This is especially interesting considering the latest drones in use by the US military.
You can find a lot of people to fight your wars, but they are expensive to train, unreliable, and to gain experience they need to risk serious injury or death. On the other hand, you can mass produce battle robots to extremely precise specifications, and control them safely from a command bunker many kilometers away with this technology.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
While that sounds all fine and dandy, if I understand this technology, it is not wireless. I am sure that the military could come up with some amazingly devious ideas with this, but I do not think this would be one. How could you transmit a stream of photons bearing the encryption to a remote location out of line of sight without some type of optical cable and maintain an error rate of around 9%? I am sure they have some other shit worked up for that!!!
There is nothing really exciting about this other than the overkill usage of quantum cryptography (also called quantum key exchange).
Basically, they are trying to generate enough keys so any succesful breaking of the cipher used gets only one frame of video. The only "exciting" part is they are using quantum cryptography to do this. However, this is like using a sledgehammer to push in a thumb tack - It uses a lot more hardware, and isn't the easiest or best method.
Another way to do this would be to conduct a large number of Diffie-Hellman key exchanges or STS exchanges, (one for each frame), and use the new key for each frame.
Or, even easier, both sides could use identical Linear Feedback Shift Registers to generate the same keys that they need. They cost way less than $20k and since a compromise of the system at either end would destroy the privacy afforded by the quantum encryption, just as secure.
Or, they could exchange one-time pads on a DVD and use the bits on there as the key. If my math is right, then a 4GB CD could hold enough keys for over 1100 hours of video, assuming a 256 bit key and 30 frames/sec. Exchanging 2 or 3 DVDs a year (if that) doesn't seem unreasonable.
None of these methods require a dedicated fiber line connecting the two groups. It can be performed over regular Ethernet if the groups want to. Translation: I can use it to talk to someone more than 120km away.
This isn't to say that some groups wouldn't want quantum security for something - if I was a Swiss bank that made daily transfers of a billion dollars to a German or Italian or French bank, then sure, I should spend the extra couple hundred k for an obscenely secure system.
This also begs the question of why encrypt each frame differently? Since it is VIDEO, then something in the picture is probably important - like a PowerPoint slide or graph or something. Since a presenter usually spends a minute or two on each slide, this means that an attacker would only need to decrypt one out of every 1800 slides (assuming 30 frames/second) to get the information they wanted. I think that it is a good idea to change keys as often as possible, but you have to ask what is the benefit for the added cost/overhead. In this case, I don't think it is very much.
So nice use of the "quantum cryptography" buzzword, but bad application of crypto technology in general.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
look at the ratings on his comments.
Come on slashdot people -- its obvious that none of us like this parasitic-poster.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
So, maybe I haven't been following the news, but have there been many instances of corporate video conferences being tapped/monitored/etc.?!
... maybe that's just me?
I understand the need to develop these technologies, but at least admit that there isn't any immediate demand besides possibly military applications. I much rather have someone working on securing ChoicePoint, Lexus Nexus, and a few other large data warehousing systems
Quantum cryptography is neat, to be sure, but what happens if the cat dies?
I haven't lost my mind; it's backed up on a CD-R somewhere
While I agree with the thrust of your post, there's one bone I have to pick.
Diffie-Hellman and all other nominal one-way functions haven't been proven secure - it could well be possible that one-way functions don't exist, in which case all security based on them is worthless. Even if OWFs do exist and Diffie-Hellman is one it is still breakable in exponential time, which is vulnerable if quantum computers (or equivalent) are developed, and could potentially be vulnerable to a specially-designed supercomputer. OTOH a functional quantum link is completely eavesdrop-proof when proper protocols are used.
Sure, most people don't have to worry about a secret D-H/OWF inverting algorithm, but for the NSA and some of the other people this is targeted at even that tiny bit of extra security is incredibly valuable.
The amount of money pouring into quantum cryptography almost makes you wonder if the NSA might have found that OWFs do not exist...
What's it going to cost to securely install the equipment? Maybe the guys installing it make some modifications so they can get the data before/after the optical link. If you're sending over disks you could send them in small batches. If you have any reason to believe one of them has been compromised, don't use the data on those disks. You'll have to trust the driver or the guys installing the quantum equipment either way.
After you have received the disks you'll have to protect them so no one retrieves the data afterwards, but you'll have to protect your network/quantum link endpoints as well.