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Australian Company Claims Laser-Based Quantum Crypto is "Unbreakable" (Video)
The QuintessenceLabs website doesn't mince words when it comes to self-promotion. It boasts that they are "The world’s first company to harness the quantum properties of lasers to herald a new generation of data security." InvestCanberra says, "the defense and security policy and procurement centre of Australia is the natural location for large conglomerate defense and security corporations and specialist cyber security, advanced communications and radar, ICT and surveillance businesses alike," and goes on to list QuintessenceLabs as one of several "locally headquartered companies that have grown into internationally successful organizations."
Here's another statement taken from the company's website: "QuintessenceLabs is the first in the world to exploit a new generation of quantum cryptographic technology which enables unbreakable, secure storage and communication of sensitive information through the generation of an ultra-secure cryptographic key." Unbreakable? That's a strong boast. Is it true? And even if it's only partly true, your upper management may call on you to explain (and possibly implement) laser-based quantum security, so you need to know what it is and how it works -- and whether it's something your company (or your client companies) need.
Here's another statement taken from the company's website: "QuintessenceLabs is the first in the world to exploit a new generation of quantum cryptographic technology which enables unbreakable, secure storage and communication of sensitive information through the generation of an ultra-secure cryptographic key." Unbreakable? That's a strong boast. Is it true? And even if it's only partly true, your upper management may call on you to explain (and possibly implement) laser-based quantum security, so you need to know what it is and how it works -- and whether it's something your company (or your client companies) need.
Laser-Based Quantum Crypto is "Unbreakable"
Sharks: 1
NSA: 0
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"laser based" is irrelevant, except as a way to get the quantum effects.
And even if those effects are real, I'm guessing that 'quantum' is not able to provide stronger encryption, only to make it easier to *break* encryption.
Tell your boss to spend the money on a new yacht instead.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This will never see the market. Prediction.
I've not heard any explanation for how such systems prevent a man in the middle attack, I suspect the answer is simply that they don't. Of course, if you were to combine quantum cryptography with more pedestrian forms you might be able to make the claim, but if you're going to do that aren't there easier methods of unbreakable communication?
Snowden reveals quantum NSA giant mirror hacking conspiracy.
Quantum Cryptography, if implemented correctly, does result in essentially unbreakable results. From my memory of the subject (admittedly several years stale), the only manner in which a properly implemented system may be broken requires unreasonable conditions (such as Eve being capable of controlling cosmic rays directed at detectors).
That said, if the the photon detectors are not of sufficient selectiveness, there is a small amount of tolerance to attack. However, even then, it would be virtually impossible to accomplish reliably outside of a laboratory where one may control all parameters.
Finally, this system is not the first, as I was aware of systems commercially available over a decade ago. The market, to date, has not been large. That said, with increasing prevalence of information that governments and other entities are acting as Eves, that might change.
Claiming unbreakable is idiotic and is just an indicator that the people at said company have no imagination. We have no idea what new techniques will be developed over the next year or 2 let alone decades and to make a claim something is unbreakable is just asking to be shot down, look how well the "unbreakable" claim worked for Oracle.
Then for sure it will declared illegal for the general public.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It's a one-time pad system. OTP systems are theoretically unbreakable. The weakness of OTP systems occurs during the exchange or transmission of the OTP to the recipient.
They claim that "Any attempt to intercept the exchange of the key causes detectable variations in the quantum states carrying the cryptographic key, alerting both sender and receiver to the attack and allowing them to take mitigating action."
It appears to me that the catch is that transmissions must remain on the fiber link of their equipment, I.E., in-house.
Did I understand that correctly?
It should be possible in theory to create a quantum communication system that can't be tapped in any way. For it to be useful though, there is the issue of cost, reliability, error rate, bandwidth etc.
Even then if I had an absolutely perfect system - two boxes that magically communicate with each other, I still haven't solved the great majority of data loss issues. Most data loss is not from people breaking strong encryption, it is from weakness in the entire system - from data left for memory scrapers, to people with inappropriate system access, to people who write their passwords on yellow-stickeys.
Think about it - even the NSA wasn't able to protect their sensitive data.
There might be cases where this technology would help, but I suspect they are pretty rare .
There is no perfectly secure system - there is ALWAYS a way to break it. Even one-time pads, which are mathematically as perfect as the source of random numbers they use, are subject to MITM attacks and to trying to break the random key (the Soviets tried to do this - even atmospheric radio noise isn't completely, 100% unpredictable).
And that's ignoring the fact that what you want to protect is information - the channel it's transmitted on is not the only place it exists. Is it stored anywhere? Is the storage physically secure? If encrypted on-disk, how secure is the key storage? If it's only in two people's memory, how hard are *they* to bribe? Or break - lead-pipe cryptanalysis is a pretty powerful tool.
The various surveillance systems aren't sniffing data streams and breaking encryption. They are either monitoring unencrypted endpoints OR they are mining the databases with full knowledge of the endpoints.
Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc just lets the NSA log into their endpoint systems and gets the data residing there. No crypto needed. The NSA doesn't have magic decryption software.
Looking at their web site, I notice a few things. Namely, if you want any specifics, you need to "Inquire" by providing contact information so that their horde of sales representatives can contact you with the information you desire. But for the bit of information you can get without giving them contact information, I quote the following little gem from their web site involving modes of operation.
Key Expansion
When very high rates of data encryption are necessary, key expansion can be used in which the QKD key material is expanded through a deterministic random bit generator (DRBG) algorithm to produce the one time pad key. This mode reduces the amount of QKD key material necessary for encryption, yet still provides exceptionally high data confidentiality.
I find it quite enlightening that they claim that using "Key expansion" that they create a "one time pad". That immediately raises all sorts of red flags since what's created isn't a "one time pad". And the fact that they obviously don't know the actual meaning of that phrase calls into question their competence about cryptography.
This is not a new technology, and have been under lab testing for a while now. The problem is that what's theoretically unbreakable isn't that secure in practice. Turns out it's quite hard to distinguish between eavesdropping and noise.
And, like any random source, you can use it for an unbreakable one time pad. That's cool.
So I guess the question is "are there problems with current hardware random number generators?", and probably "what are the failure states for this new method, how do they arise, and how hard are they to detect?"
Regardless of those answers, there's still going to be limited utility for something like this. I don't think a lot of gamers are worried about game randomness not being random enough (which is a ridiculous application suggested in the video).
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Well tested, familiar conventional crypto algorithms are very, very hard to break. With correctly generated keys of sufficient length, they are practically unbreakable for longer than most secrets need to be kept.
But that doesn't mean *systems* built around those algorithms are unbreakable. It's all that stuff around the strong cryptographic algorithms that introduces weakness.
So claims of "unbreakable" algorithms or system components don't get me excited. If you want to make me sit up and take notice, claim that your invention makes secure cryptographic systems *simpler*.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Any crypto can be considered 'unbreakable' until someone actually breaks it. This too will be broken, but how long until then, and how expensive the resources to do so.
Besides, the most consistent way of breaking any crypto is do an end run by 'attacking' the wetware, aka people are your weak link in keeping secrets. If you still don't understand, look up 'Social Engineering'.
If they could just do something about that NSA backdoor.
And so does reading passwords on tape stuck inside of drawers.
Unbreakable? That's a strong boast. Is it true? And even if it's only partly true...
...then it's false.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
unless you're only concerned with the true part.
The fact that they even claim it's unbreakable makes it obvious that the claim is just commercial hype.
Every new encryption technology is unbreakable at first. But with time, somebody always comes up with a way to defeat the system. Always.
Real researchers are always careful to qualify their claims. For example, they might say that "it is unbreakable by today's processors using known technologies."
Don't tell a crowd of nerds that your new product is unbreakable, unless you actually want them to try very, very hard to break it. It's like waving a flag at a bull, you'd better have your pads laced up nice and snug, because you're goin' for a ride.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. The "eavesdropper" is classically named "Eve".
As with all such schemes, this only does the key exchange. You still have conventional crypto in use for the data transfer. And quantum crypto implementations have been broken before, so even if the quantum-mechanic assumptions hold up (and that is a big "if"), this is likely far from "unbreakable". It has a number of severe limitations though, like needing its own network (in addition) and inability to route or switch traffic.
Basically worthless.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Unbreakable, until we find out who was sent, convinced, or co-opted to put the "back door" in the code.
Sorry if I seem a bit jaded by all this, but I've been watching this surveillance madness since McCarthyism and COINTELPRO: just assume they know anything you send or say to more than three people. Never stop fighting; out think them and we'll out last them.
Yours,
Hippie with a Tire Iron
I call BS. All they are doing is generating noise from a laser. Anyone can do this with a laser and a detector diode. Splitting the beam and subtracting is nothing novel. I did this back in junor high in science class. (Back then a laser was a much bigger deal, but still.)
His discussion of the ADC is nice, but again, that's standard stuff. Same goes for his TLS talking points.
These guys are pumping out buzz words faster than their FPGA.
Wonder what the value prop for quantum approach v. a few TB hard disks where (:RDRAND:) is used to fill each with the same garbage installed at each peer. A modern HDD is more than enough for years of voice, email, and file transfers all without any fancy lasers, beam splitters or having to part with countless thousands of dollars.
While in anything resembling a real network with lots of communicating parties the required number of disks quickly become impractical are there any remaining differences worth considering? There is still an initial classic key required on both sides subject to compromise as any deployed hard disk would. If you securely erase data at both peers as randomness is consumed you effectively have your forward secrecy. If hard disks are compromised...well does not the same risk apply to encryption key compromise? If you compromise initial classic keys you can own any future quantum rekey mechanism just the same by operating a MITM proxy.
Assuming traffic would have to be pretty specific and special to invest your time on quantum crypto vs any number of seemingly fine encryption algorithms providing forward secrecy with no known vulnerabilities ..the potential market has got to be quite small for quantum crypto regardless of whether it works as advertised or not.
Card numbers you need this.
How is this different from the commercial solution that ID Quantique offers now already for several years?
http://www.idquantique.com/
Oh, so now we get modded down for calling out concocted stories? Yup, that's about the limit for me. 1. To date there is no working quantum computer that has even been properly validated, so no. 2. Since when do editors post non-submitted content, or content not referencing the submitter? 3. SHENANIGANS!!!
http://al-nqaa.com/