Slashdot Mirror
The Clock Is Ticking On Encryption
CWmike writes "In the indictment that led to the expulsion of ten Russian spies from the US in the summer of 2010, the FBI said that it gained access to their communications after surreptitiously entering one of the spies' homes, during which agents found a piece of paper with a 27-character password. The FBI had found it more productive to burglarize a house than to crack a 216-bit code, despite having the computational resources of the US government behind it, writes Lamont Wood. That's because modern cryptography, when used correctly, is rock solid. Cracking an encrypted message can require time frames that dwarf the age of the universe. That's the case today. 'The entire commercial world runs off the assumption that encryption is rock solid and is not breakable,' says Joe Moorcones, vice president of information security firm SafeNet. But within the foreseeable future, cracking those same codes could become trivial, thanks to quantum computing."
Yeah, that's true.
Wait, who didn't know this already? The title is misleading, but the fact that quantum computing breaks RSA is pretty standard knowledge (among people who have heard of quantum computing at all, I guess). Of course, there are other encryption schemes that seem to work just fine (e.g. Elliptic curve cryptography) with quantum computing, and there's not much evidence that algorithms other than RSA are broken. Note: factoring isn't NP-complete! So far there's no reason to believe it's not an "easy" problem, except that we haven't figured out how to do it. More intersetingly, there's a lot of research being done on quantum cryptography, which is really quite cool. In total, quantum computing should probably give us more security than it breaks, except for the idiots who keep using outdated algorithms long after they're broken, but they'd be screwed anyway.
So, the sky is falling! Oh wait, no, that's just the weather changing.
I rely on magic pixie dust found on top of the space elevator. It's easier to get than a useful quantum computer and will be for quite some time.
That kind of behavior, burglarizing houses, committing a crime to stop other crimes, is destructive to the rest of the nation.
I don't find it such a bad thing, if they have a warrant from a non-corrupt judicial system.
You can hardly say fighting espionage is inherently corrupt.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I rather think that the FBI is quite careful to check that you are not in the house before they go in. They probably have someone trailing you who will warn them if you start heading home or if they lose track of where you are. They are not idiots and have no interest in getting into a firefight unnecessarily.
Basically, stop being stupid. The FBI is not going round breaking into people's houses willy-nilly. They entered those specific houses because they had probable cause to believe that their occupants were hostile agents of a foreign power engaged in illegal espionage, and they had acquired warrants to do so, supported by oath and particularly describing the places to be searched and the things to be seized. Are you seriously complaining because government agents obeyed the Constitution to the letter in the course of exercising their duty to uphold the rule of law?! I can scarcely believe that any American would display such contempt for the principles on which your hard-won freedom is founded.