Quantum Encryption Implementation Broken

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Professor Johannes Skaar's Quantum Hacking group at NTNU have found a new way to break quantum encryption. Even though quantum encryption is theoretically perfect, real hardware isn't, and they exploit these flaws. Their technique relies on a particular way of blinding the single photon detectors so that they're able to perform an intercept-resend attack and get a copy of the secret key without giving away the fact that someone is listening. This attack is not merely theoretical, either. They have built an eavesdropping device and successfully attacked their own quantum encryption hardware. More details can be found in their conference presentation."

Comments

Nothing to see here. Move along.

[nacturation]

How is it news that a flawed implementation of a perfectly secure algorithm can be taken advantage of? Cryptographers have been doing side channel attacks for a long time.

Re:I've heard this before

[inviolet]

And Communism works, IN THEORY.

No it doesn't. The theory of Communism proposes that humans will work for the betterment of their fellow tribe members. This works in small tribes where everyone knows each other (families and 'communes'), but was known in advance to fail for larger groups. The theory is bunk because it utterly fails to understand the fact that personal economic incentives are the primary driver of human behavior.

As was Marx's derivation of the value of the worker. He completely missed the fact that the value-add comes from the synergistic arrangement (arranged by the entrepreneur) of worker, raw materials, and the means of production.

Re:I've heard this before

[lgw]

Actually, Marx's main flaw was in how he valued technology. The man wasn't a starry-eyed idiot, but he just failed to see the value of automation - something not so obvious in his time. Marx directly claimed that machines cannot lower the cost of goods, because machines would naturally be sold for the value of the labor they replaced. Most of the benefit of capitalism is that technology reduces the cost of goods, so that our standard of living improves continuously over time despite the common man never getting a larger share of the wealth.

At any given point in time, the only reason capitalism does any better job of creating a "synergistic arrangement of worker, raw materials, and the means of production" is that capitalism self-corrects for corruption faster (companies fail faster than governments). In practice this is a minor factor as successful companies quickly infiltrate government to create regulations that raise barriers to competition (markets are never free for long).

Over generations, however, the advance of technology is huge - far more important that the distribution of wealth to one's standard of living. And free markets (to the exten they exist) are far and away the best stimulus for new technology. This is why established firms so often seek government regulation: to prevent (or at least slow) disruptive technology.