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Hackers Eavesdrop On Quantum Crypto With Lasers
Martin Hellman writes "According to an article in Nature magazine, quantum hackers have performed the first 'invisible' attack on two commercial quantum cryptographic systems. By using lasers on the systems — which use quantum states of light to encrypt information for transmission —' they have fully cracked their encryption keys, yet left no trace of the hack.'"
Gee, this technology is really underwhelming isn't it? It's almost like theoretical claims rarely match up with reality and creating something that delivers security takes years of dedicated effort in an open environment.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"We have exploited a purely technological loophole that turns a quantum cryptographic system into a classical system, without anyone noticing," says Makarov.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
So, I guess the encryption system used here isn't really "quantum", since above doesn't apply, is it?
Eve gets round this constraint by 'blinding' Bob's detector — shining a continuous, 1-milliwatt laser at it.
So Bob could just detect the blinding signal and stop transmitting.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
If you read the article, you'll notice that the 'hack' is a classic man in the middle attack, and the receiving end can receive both classic and quantum messages. The man in the middle (after reading the quantum message) passes it on as a classic message, and the receiving device does not give a warning that the message received is a classic message, instead of a quantum message.
So it's really an design error on the device side, not a true hack in that quantum states were undisturbed regardless of reading them.
Mod parent up!!
And add this citation to the article text!!! *eyeroll*
Makorov informed both companies of the details of the hack before publishing, so that patches could made, avoiding any possible security risk.
that's teh shizzle bizzle
The bigger they are the harder they fall or in encryption the more complicated the easier to crack
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
No, it IS a huge problem. If you turn a quantum computing system into a classical system, you basically revert it to sending the key in plaintext. While it does not break the theory of quantum encryption, breaking all (commonly) available implementations of quantum crypto should be enough to be qualified as "huge kick in the balls".
It is quantum-secure-transmission. That is that you theoretically detect (article non withstanding) when somebody attempt to eavesdrop your transmission. But the bits are plaintext (or encrypted by the start and end machines before the secure quantum transmission but not by the protocol itself).
There are some photographs of the hacked hardware and the hacking tools on the page of the researchers.
So, the attack works like this: the middle man sends a continuous laser down to one of the recievers, and simultaneously reads off the transmitted photons (disrupting their state). When "blinded" by this laser light, the reciever still reads the information from the transmitted photon data, but ignores it's quantum state. I don't know the limitations and techniques behind constructing quantum-state detecting photon recievers, but this just has to be a flaw in this particular construction? Maybe the state detector gets overloaded? In any case, it seems the system has been "patched" already.
Emotions! In your brain!
Quantum hackers?
Quackers!
This is what you get when even educated men can't make sense of your technology.
Pretty obvious now we need to return to traditional cryptosystems such as rot13 etc.
Arguably not the most secure, but it is efficient. And for military use, where security
requirements are higher, triple-rot13 is an option.
I was surprised to discover that there were commercial systems of quantum cryptography. Quantum cryptography is academic at this point. It is not as strong as old fashioned cryptography (like AES) and is much more expensive. Then I realized that there is no reason that someone can't use both. It would be pretty ridiculous if someone were using quantum cryptography as their only security, and not encrypting the data first with old fashioned cryptography.
So it's really an design error on the device side, not a true hack in that quantum states were undisturbed regardless of reading them.
As long as the attacer only wants to get the key, he does not care if this is a "true" hack (which would require a substantial change in our understanding of quantum physics) or a "cheaing" hack that only breaks the implementation. The major selling point of quantum crypto is the "100% security". If it's only "100% minus any bugs in the implementation" (which it obviously is), I could as well use a classical key exchange mechanism.
"100% security" ... "100% minus any bugs in the implementation"
I truly wonder if there is anything like "100% security". Probably if there is no 'security' at all (if it is not needed? impossible to observe?).
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I thought the point of quantum encryption was that it could not be attacked by a man in the middle without revealing that an attack took place. Seems like it was compromised in an unexpected way.
Since one of the goals of a quantum cryptographic system is to prevent just that then this is a major failure in the design.
A kick in the balls (breaking all current implementations) is not the same as cutting them out and mounting them in a trophy case (proving there can be no secure implementation).
Either one hurts though.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Poor Alice and Bob, they do not have a chance ever to live normal lives without hordes of geeky cryptographers debating/fighting over every bloody bit they exchange.
... enacts laws that the person must de-crypt the message if required or get jailed. Lazy bums.
the more complicated the easier to crack
You know, the one that involves "encouraging" someone to give up the keys or to hell with the keys, just "extract" the original message.
Too bad for those using the Gitmo attack that torture isn't a reliable way to extract information.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Unfortunately without that caveat the article isn't as scary.
Come on editors, Do a better job, don't just put the article through, read it yourself.
oh boy, am I getting old?
Tham my vien
Thuc pham chuc nang
Dong ho
Van phong pham
Chan ga goi
Hoa tuoi
May hut am
May chieu
Camera quan sat
May phat dien
Tong dai
May Massage
And here is the biggest problem with dealing with anything that evolves. Someone or something else will come along and evolve a way to defeat it. This happens in the world of biological viruses and bacteria, this happens in the world of animals, this happens in the world of Electronic Viruses and Spyware, and this happens with encryption.
I remember when the contest was to crack either the 56-bit or the 64-bit (do not remember exactly which) and it was done in a matter of days and not the years it was thought of happening in.
I remember when 8 character alpha numeric passwords were thought to be enough to be secure.
My brother-in-law at the NSA who works on securing the Government's firewalls says that it is an uphill battle at best.
I can honestly say that none of the stories of anything getting cracked surprises me any more. It seems that it is not a question of "if" it can be cracked, but "when" and "how quickly".
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Which also means that it may end up being more predictable and sensitive to attack.
As soon as a crypto is predictable the road left to crack a given message is shorter. Not that it's easy, it will still require some computing power.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Don't write or talk anything. None will intercept it.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
There is a crack, a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.
How about hacked quantum systems downgraded to std transmission?
There was no hacking of quantum crypto here.
Even respecting the working-all-day-and-night-in-the-basement-computer-lab origin of the term, using 'hacker' in the article seems like a blatant attempt to jazz it up, making it at first glance seem to be more about something akin to bank heist than a story about funded researches working in a university lab trying to find flaws in a security system, with the manufacturer's full approval to boot.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
The USA Defense Industry and Congress will write a law that will prevent anyone (except .Com, .Gov & .Mil) from criminally hacking qEncrypt, making USAll safe from Norwegian Hacker Scientist. Also, US, EU, RU, CN... people and governments will be happy to comply with more legal control.
%~P=WeRFycked+*
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Scotty: "The more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
You'd think double would be enough
Well, there are several points here:
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Actually, it should be quite easy to reveal that someone continuously shines a laser on your system. It's just that no one up to now thought about that possible attack vector, therefore no one tested for it. I'm pretty sure that future versions of the cryptographic device will detect that attack.
Besides detecting the laser directly, maybe a strategy to prevent this type of attack would be to generate additional quantum signals for Bob's detector inside Bob's device and testing that the detector correctly detects them (this would not only detect this specific attack, but any attack which turns Bob's detector into a classical one).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
'they have fully cracked their encryption keys, yet left no trace of the hack.'
It is only because nobody recognized the couple of fins lying around as evidence.
Unfortunately, not everyone has the space required for an aquarium to contain the sharks with those fricken lasers.
I'm more interested in quantum computing to generate encryption keys that can't be broken by other quantum computing. Is there even a theoretical model for that?
--
make install -not war
There are two other problems besides people with no information:
- People who have been trained to resist torture long enough for their information to become useless.
- People who have been trained to feed misinformation after "sufficient" torture so they sound credible.
Offtopic for laughs:
then torture is an element of a random story generator.
So THAT'S how come the slush pile is so big!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The article is either missing massive details or these researchers are vastly overstating the power of their technique. The entire _point_ of quantum key exchange is that if Eve intercepts the signal she cannot tell if she read a 0 or a 1 because she does not know which basis the 0 or 1 was generated in. Even IF Eve passed a 1 along every time she read a 1, when Alice and Bob go to do the basis comparison over the standard channel they will notice errors because Eve read the signal in the wrong basis and passed along an incorrect value.
I've tried reading the actual journal paper, but unfortunately they just seem to handwave this problem away. Maybe there's a reason they can, but its sure as hell not explained as far as I can see unless they're assuming Eve has also compromised the classical channel as well as the quantum channel.
The laws of probability forbid it!
Why the GP was modded troll is beyond me. This is a "huge kick in the balls". Isn't the point of QC to make it easy to detect if someone has even listened in, let alone broken anything? I'd have to say that what it means is the current implementation of QC is an epic fail. Back to the old drawing board.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
So it's really an design error on the device side, not a true hack in that quantum states were undisturbed regardless of reading them.
Thanks for pointing that out! It makes the system so much more secure, knowing that...
This is a "true hack" in the same way that the cost of sending a mission to Mars is a "real problem": scientists and engineers often want to simplify the world by restricting the domain of "real problems" to ones they know how to solve. But reality doesn't care about human domain boundaries.
In this case, they have hacked the system, which has the effect of being able to read the communications that pass through it. No cryto system is more secure than the least secure channel, and they have demonstrated that even though part of the system is 100% secure the rest is pretty easily hackable. This will always be the case with quantum crypto so long as it has to interface with the classical world at some point.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Inigo:
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
not a true hack in that quantum states were undisturbed regardless of reading them.
Dammit, I had hoped to base my perpetuum mobile on these hackers' violation of the laws of physics :(
taking advantage of an implementation loophole isn't exactly 'invisible' (even given that they used quotation marks around 'invisible').
What struck me as significant was the summary states they hacked a commercial crypto system. In other words, the implication is that someone could buy this system and think they are secure, but they can still be invisibly and undetectably hacked. Undetectable by this system is what is important -- it doesn't matter to me if some *other* system can detect the hack if the one I'm *using* doesn't.
Or to put it another way, a perfect encryption system has yet to be demonstrated. Vendors will still be happy to sell you their perfect system.
Or to put it a third way, the difference between theory and practice is
Quantum computers will cripple 'his' PKI system, but now he got to announce the cripplement of quantum cryptography
I'm curious, how many flavors does this hack comes in?
This wouldn't even work if this quantum link weren't so simple. This system is at least as simple as a serial link, and what they've done is like unplugging that link from the intended recipient computer and plugging it into their own.
It looks like the only real security in the system 100% depended on MITMs being impossible - which is still true (from what I understand) - they've just diverted the traffic altogether rather than doing a MITM.
If there were any authentication involved or the data being sent was actually encrypted this would be a non-issue.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
One time pad with a truly random key. Getting good entropy is a problem, but not a deal breaker. Key exchange is the weak point (quantum crypto is supposed to fix that, but who can afford dedicated, well guarded fiber from each location to each location? or have a working system for that matter...), but with with multi-gigabyte MicroSD it is a realistic alternative to symmetric encryption for reasonably sized messages.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
That isn't necessarily the case for side channel attacks, as the side channel to capture isn't known in advance of exploits. Similarly man in the middle attacks need to be live.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
The thing is that in a good QCS, you should be able to tell if Eve is arround. This guys did this without anyone noticing. Yes, its an ugly hack, it does not change the beautiful math behind QC. But hell, last I checked, this is how cracking works.
NO SIG
The only true way to secure a system is with a large data key that only exists offline. Would be cool if the key is generated by an offline "seeding" machine. I would "dock" all the systems in the same room and create at least 32GB keys and put them on super fast Compact flash cards. Different keysets for each computer. Systems that need to have a secure connection need the keys fedexed or brought by hand.
That's also not 100% secure. Are you 100% sure there's nobody ad fedex who might open that fedex letter, copy the key, and then close the letter again? And sending a messenger isn't secure either: How do you know the messenger wasn't bribed by Eve to give her a copy of the key? Even if you personally go there, there may still be some vulnerability. E.g. if you can't go there in one day and sleep in a hotel, someone at the hotel might copy the key while you sleep.
Yes, it's getting increasingly improbable, but the probability never goes to zero. On the other hand, costs go up, and as soon as the cost is larger than the cost of a stolen key, you'll simply not use that method.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You can make it easy. If you're willing to undergo an hour of torture without cracking then you can keep your secret key (if you have it).
You forgot...
"if you survive."
You mean with that caveat?
I'm not sure what's your concern, but this is not a man-in-the-middle attack. We do intercept-resend in the quantum channel (photons) but leave the classical channel alone, just listen to it. Of course Alice and Bob do authentication of the classical channel (this is a part of the QKD protocol), but that passes just fine as we do not alter the classical authenticated traffic.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
We are not controlling Bob's basis: he chooses his detection basis randomly. What we do is to send a bright-light state that does not cause a detection event if Bob chooses a basis not matching Alice's, but causes a detection event in a specific detector if Bob chooses the same basis as Eve.
So you're actually exploiting the combination TWO flaws:
- One in Bob's detector - which you can get to efficiently mimic the reception you achieved despite your lack of knowledge of Bob's expected polarization.
- One in the protocol - which has so much redundancy attempting to cover for far more than 50% bit loss - and for the receiver's own lack of synchronization with the transmitter's polarization basis selection - that you can discard half the bits due to your own wrong guesses and still echo enough bits to give Bob the information he needs to handshake with Alice and convince the pair of them that things are just fine.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
However, one difference betweeen the classical and quantum case is that in the quantum case any possible exploit has to be "online" (i.e. you have to actually intercept the actual sent message and manage to manipulate the receiving system), while for classical key exchange the breaking can also be after the fact (i.e. if all you want is the exchanged information, you can passively record all data and then try to break it afterwards).
But note that these systems only use quantum encryption to perform a key exchange (generation of a shared secret key). The actual data exchanges are then done using the shared session key and ordinary cryptography. Thus the data exchange can be recorded for later attack on the ordinary cryptosystem. The quantum system (provided it is working correctly) just assures that the shared key has to be found by cyphertext analysis and/or guessing, rather than non-real-time compromise of the key exchange itself.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
But the quantum-generated key is used as one-time pad, which is provably secure as long as the key isn't revealed. At least that's how it is supposed to be done (I don't know the specific device, but I can't imagine them doing it differently).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.