Quantum Encryption Explained

angelos writes "New Scientist Magazine has an article discussing the theories of Quantum Encryption. Short and not too complicated an article, but makes for some interesting reading. " Very cool overview of the subject - takes a look at the potential future of encryption and why the curent system of encryption will not last.

Comments

No.

[aheitner]

The problem of how to break something like RSA is a mathematical one: either some operation is easy to do in one direction and hard to do in another, or it's in fact easy in both directions. Factoring is one example of such an operation.

The proposed quantum scheme relieson the fact that whether a photon will pass through a filter polarized at 45 degrees to the photon's own aligment is random at a quantum level, eg. can't be determined. Eve is screwed at a fundamental physics level. The only thing that could crack this would be major changes in our understanding of particle physics.

It's open to debate whether this is more or less likely than finding a quick factoring method (or in the case of RSA, a quick way to find Phi(n) from n). . .

You're doing the NSA's job for them!

[Paul Crowley]

The conclusions of those "people out there" are not based on anything resembling a fact. If this sort of mindless, groundless pessimism puts even one person off encrypting just one email message with the best tools we have (PGP, GPG etc) then the NSA have done part of their job without spending a single compute cycle.

Learn a little about how modern crypto works (The Cryptogram is a good place to start). Read the descriptions of some of the AES candidates: Serpent, RC6 or Rijndael might be good ones to start with. Even in the supremely unlikely case that the NSA can crack everything we use, it would still cost them something in compute cycles, and encrypting all the world's email would still put a significant barrier in the path of their intelligence-gathering activities.
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