If the prof suggests you to submit a conference paper, he should cover the costs of your trip, period. This is reasonable and here is how it works in the academia: prof's name is in the author list > he has one more publication in his CV and his current grant report > when he's applying for a grant in the future, better chance to get it. For any decent grant, conference expenses are a footnote. Thus it definitely makes sense for the prof to fly you there if a publication comes out as the result.
As for your own sake, do this of course (if the prof or university pays). This is fun, useful, you get to see what a conference is like, will listen to talks on diverse topics and get stunned by how littlle you know and understand yet, etc. This is a good item on your CV too, except you should not pay for it (disclaimer: I am from socialist Europe.)
I am just back from China, have stayed in Beijing this Friday (the day the article speaks about). I also visited two other cities, Hefei and Wuhu. I actually thought Beijing air and water were much cleaner than air and water in the two other cities. Tap water in Hefei (central China, 2 million population) strongly smelled sewage, and pollution haze was much thicker than in Beijing.
Generally you're thinking along the right lines, but if this stuff makes you vibe so much I would recommend to start reading original research literature at this point. J. Cryptology 5, 3 (1992) is a good starting paper, then you can move on to recent articles.
Your first item is correct, however for the second one I think you need to study a good description of the QKD protocol.
The QKD protocol is designed to cope with a huge bit loss, both due to detector inefficiency and the loss in the fiber line; in fact, in a typical setup only 1 in 1000 Alice's photon's may be detected by Bob. The loss in the line is the killer item: the best optical fiber is has loss about 0.2 dB per km. This means over 50 km, nine out of ten photons sent by Alice will be lost. (In our attack Eve can just gain all this loss to her advantage, by placing her intercept unit close to Alice and getting all ten photons.) Other losses and inefficiencies come in addition to the line loss.
The transmitter (Alice) and the receiver (Bob) cannot synchronize their basis selection in advance, but they have to choose them randomly and independently (so that Eve does not know either if the bases), otherwise QKD just cannot be secure. They synchronize the bases only after the photon transmission.
Good. 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. See figure 2 in the paper for illustration. Thus, half the time our bright-light state failes to induce any detection, which translates to just 50% detection efficiency. This would be a problem if Bob's photon detectors (unblinded, not under attack) were 100% efficient and the transmission fibre were lossless, which is however not the case. The photon detectors are normally only about 10% efficient, and there is typically a few dB loss in the fibre between Alice and Bob. Thus Eve can easily hide her 50% (in)efficiency in all practical cases.
In schemes where Bob uses "passive basis choice" (not in commercial systems but in many research setups) we can choose the detection basis for Bob and have 100% click efficiency.
The attack workflow has been slightly simplified for the hews article. The actual Eve's workflow is: 1. Blind Bob with a continuous laser, 2. Intercept all photons coming from Alice using a copy of Bob's setup, 3. Every time Eve has a detection, she activates another laser to send a strong light pulse to Bob that tricks Bob's detectors to produce the same detection outcome. I wish there were 4. Profit!, but as for now our lab is running out of grant money with no other funding in sight:)).
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.
As you correctly notice, Eve does not know Alice's basis and will half the time choose a wrong basis for measurement. We just bite the problem from the other end: we make sure Bob's basis always matches Eve's. Alice and Bob always compare their bases after the transmission and then discard the bits where their bases did not match. During this comparison all bits where Eve has chosen a wrong basis will be discarded. What remains in the key are the bits where Alice, Eve and Bob all have the same basis.
We had to be a bit concise in the article because of Nature's 1500 words limit on the content, but I think we do explain the above:).
I'm not sure the manufacturers would approve the existence of our lab if they could dictate it. Thankfully we are independent and need not seek their approval. The manufacturers did appreciate responsible disclosure, though. I don't know how this hacking affects their business in the short term (may as well be detrimental to sales), even though it is surely good for business in the long term as it leads to more secure systems.
Sometimes, i just dont understand people's motivation for this sort of thing. Copernicus was a great man, why on earth do we need to dig up his corpse and rebury him to honor his achievements?
I think in essence this is a church advert. (They couldn't care less of the science he has discovered. Religion needs promotion. Same happened at the death of Newton.)
Google has just put the best holiday logo ever on the homepage. A working PacMan!
I wonder what's the worldwide economic impact of this joke, in terms of lost productivity. It probably beats most terrorist acts and natural disasters:).
There are two things about this publication that make it remarkable.
1. This is a new useful information processing primitive that is only possible to do quantum, not in any classical information processing (the paper cites impossibility proof in classical domain). There's just a handful such quantum primitives known today (e.g., QKD, Shor's algorithm), so discovering one more is a great deal.
2. It is practically implementable with today's quantum crypto hardware. In fact, I expect any lab that has a working free-space QKD system can be working on an experimental demonstration of location-restricted QKD right now. It may just take some software rewriting and a couple extra wi-fi links to assemble a full 2D-location QKD scheme.
To be fair I must mention that the location primitive has been published two months ago by R. Malaney from Australia. However, his version was more difficult to implement (although also doable with today's experimental techniques), and notably it lacked QKD functionality. Now with this publication the scheme is complete and is even supplied with a security proof. My applauds to the authors.
due to scientific instruments, for which it's not uncommon to have 20-30 years lifetime, and as others have pointed out due to industrial equipment with similarly long lifetime. In CNC mills for example, replacing a part of the controller is not as easy as it sounds: it's a triple redundant machine, very conservatively tested for safety.
All things being equal, the latter solution is inferior to the former. Metric is logical and much easier (powers of ten, same decimal prefixes in all units). The only thing holding the imperial system is legacy; it has no inherent advantages.
I encountered this over a year ago. In the summer 2008, to be exact. A large academic publisher's website was hacked to redirect to malware when seeing "google" in the REFERER string, yet function normally otherwise. It has taken me a day to realize it wasn't Google's or my computer problem. It has taken me two or three emails to a journal editor over a couple weeks to have the site webmaster finally notice and believe it was his server responsible and not something else. Half the traffric was hijacked, yet webmasters usually checked their own websites not through Google and assumed everything looked normal. This was an efficient trick the first time it was used.
Viewing the rover video has convinced me the US will go throuh with this space program. Real work, real schedules, real tests, capable technology. I wish NASA and the US all the best with the upcoming establishment of the lunar base.
Somewhere in the hub (where the "tentacles") converge, there is a small fancy 'designer' seating area. Lots of outlets there. When changing planes, I always walk through it.
is the second most important thing. I'd even say it's the first one: I can live without internet, but to work offline I need to charge the laptop.
At most airoports a few outlets in the waiting areas are at best inconveniently located (being designed for plugging cleaning machines rather than for traveller's use), and at worst unavailable. I've spent more than a few strolls down the halls trying to find a free outlet and a seat withing the reach of it.
Depends on how the laptop was packed. Look someday how they have to load the bags into the cargo compartment. Several bags sit atop each other. Some bags have hard edges sticking into other bags. In addition, when the bags are loaded and unloaded, they have to be handled roughly to speed up the process.
To ship safely, all fragile things have to be packed with ample padding on all sides. If you don't pack like this, please accept a high risk of damage.
Propagation of a mechanical wave (i.e., sound) in materials is ultimately field interaction between atoms. Field changes do not propagate faster than c. Actually, the speed of sound is far, far slower than c, because atoms electrically screen each other and the next atom only sees the electric field change after the previous one has moved. The inertia of the atom moving in the field slows down the process quite a bit.
This is my naive (and quite possibly incorrect) understanding of the mechanical wave propagation process. Hope somebody can explain it better;).
It is obvious from your description your main goal here was to screw over the person filing the patent
Actually, not. The researchers who published this idea openly in 2001 chose to publish openly instead of patenting, so that everyone could use it. If the other guys get a patent, it would place some hurdle on the use of the idea. Those who wanted to use it may not be aware of the 2001 publication. This is one motivation, to protect the invention which has been placed into the public domain. Another motivation was to help the USPTO keep its database clean of patents which are actually non-enforceable. Both should be the tasks of the USPTO, which is a government organization established by the society for serving the needs of this society in general. So, helping it is good, right?
Okay, that was U.S. society, and I am not living in the U.S. Call me irrational, then. Besides, I also had some curiosity in how the system works.
Slashdot Mirror
If the prof suggests you to submit a conference paper, he should cover the costs of your trip, period. This is reasonable and here is how it works in the academia: prof's name is in the author list > he has one more publication in his CV and his current grant report > when he's applying for a grant in the future, better chance to get it. For any decent grant, conference expenses are a footnote. Thus it definitely makes sense for the prof to fly you there if a publication comes out as the result.
As for your own sake, do this of course (if the prof or university pays). This is fun, useful, you get to see what a conference is like, will listen to talks on diverse topics and get stunned by how littlle you know and understand yet, etc. This is a good item on your CV too, except you should not pay for it (disclaimer: I am from socialist Europe.)
I am just back from China, have stayed in Beijing this Friday (the day the article speaks about). I also visited two other cities, Hefei and Wuhu. I actually thought Beijing air and water were much cleaner than air and water in the two other cities. Tap water in Hefei (central China, 2 million population) strongly smelled sewage, and pollution haze was much thicker than in Beijing.
Generally you're thinking along the right lines, but if this stuff makes you vibe so much I would recommend to start reading original research literature at this point. J. Cryptology 5, 3 (1992) is a good starting paper, then you can move on to recent articles.
Your first item is correct, however for the second one I think you need to study a good description of the QKD protocol.
The QKD protocol is designed to cope with a huge bit loss, both due to detector inefficiency and the loss in the fiber line; in fact, in a typical setup only 1 in 1000 Alice's photon's may be detected by Bob. The loss in the line is the killer item: the best optical fiber is has loss about 0.2 dB per km. This means over 50 km, nine out of ten photons sent by Alice will be lost. (In our attack Eve can just gain all this loss to her advantage, by placing her intercept unit close to Alice and getting all ten photons.) Other losses and inefficiencies come in addition to the line loss.
The transmitter (Alice) and the receiver (Bob) cannot synchronize their basis selection in advance, but they have to choose them randomly and independently (so that Eve does not know either if the bases), otherwise QKD just cannot be secure. They synchronize the bases only after the photon transmission.
Good. 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. See figure 2 in the paper for illustration. Thus, half the time our bright-light state failes to induce any detection, which translates to just 50% detection efficiency. This would be a problem if Bob's photon detectors (unblinded, not under attack) were 100% efficient and the transmission fibre were lossless, which is however not the case. The photon detectors are normally only about 10% efficient, and there is typically a few dB loss in the fibre between Alice and Bob. Thus Eve can easily hide her 50% (in)efficiency in all practical cases.
In schemes where Bob uses "passive basis choice" (not in commercial systems but in many research setups) we can choose the detection basis for Bob and have 100% click efficiency.
The attack workflow has been slightly simplified for the hews article. The actual Eve's workflow is: 1. Blind Bob with a continuous laser, 2. Intercept all photons coming from Alice using a copy of Bob's setup, 3. Every time Eve has a detection, she activates another laser to send a strong light pulse to Bob that tricks Bob's detectors to produce the same detection outcome. I wish there were 4. Profit!, but as for now our lab is running out of grant money with no other funding in sight :)).
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.
As you correctly notice, Eve does not know Alice's basis and will half the time choose a wrong basis for measurement. We just bite the problem from the other end: we make sure Bob's basis always matches Eve's. Alice and Bob always compare their bases after the transmission and then discard the bits where their bases did not match. During this comparison all bits where Eve has chosen a wrong basis will be discarded. What remains in the key are the bits where Alice, Eve and Bob all have the same basis.
:).
We had to be a bit concise in the article because of Nature's 1500 words limit on the content, but I think we do explain the above
with the manufacturer's full approval to boot
I'm not sure the manufacturers would approve the existence of our lab if they could dictate it. Thankfully we are independent and need not seek their approval. The manufacturers did appreciate responsible disclosure, though. I don't know how this hacking affects their business in the short term (may as well be detrimental to sales), even though it is surely good for business in the long term as it leads to more secure systems.
I think in essence this is a church advert. (They couldn't care less of the science he has discovered. Religion needs promotion. Same happened at the death of Newton.)
Google has just put the best holiday logo ever on the homepage. A working PacMan! I wonder what's the worldwide economic impact of this joke, in terms of lost productivity. It probably beats most terrorist acts and natural disasters :).
There are two things about this publication that make it remarkable.
1. This is a new useful information processing primitive that is only possible to do quantum, not in any classical information processing (the paper cites impossibility proof in classical domain). There's just a handful such quantum primitives known today (e.g., QKD, Shor's algorithm), so discovering one more is a great deal.
2. It is practically implementable with today's quantum crypto hardware. In fact, I expect any lab that has a working free-space QKD system can be working on an experimental demonstration of location-restricted QKD right now. It may just take some software rewriting and a couple extra wi-fi links to assemble a full 2D-location QKD scheme.
To be fair I must mention that the location primitive has been published two months ago by R. Malaney from Australia. However, his version was more difficult to implement (although also doable with today's experimental techniques), and notably it lacked QKD functionality. Now with this publication the scheme is complete and is even supplied with a security proof. My applauds to the authors.
due to scientific instruments, for which it's not uncommon to have 20-30 years lifetime, and as others have pointed out due to industrial equipment with similarly long lifetime. In CNC mills for example, replacing a part of the controller is not as easy as it sounds: it's a triple redundant machine, very conservatively tested for safety.
All things being equal, the latter solution is inferior to the former. Metric is logical and much easier (powers of ten, same decimal prefixes in all units). The only thing holding the imperial system is legacy; it has no inherent advantages.
I encountered this over a year ago. In the summer 2008, to be exact. A large academic publisher's website was hacked to redirect to malware when seeing "google" in the REFERER string, yet function normally otherwise. It has taken me a day to realize it wasn't Google's or my computer problem. It has taken me two or three emails to a journal editor over a couple weeks to have the site webmaster finally notice and believe it was his server responsible and not something else. Half the traffric was hijacked, yet webmasters usually checked their own websites not through Google and assumed everything looked normal. This was an efficient trick the first time it was used.
Viewing the rover video has convinced me the US will go throuh with this space program. Real work, real schedules, real tests, capable technology. I wish NASA and the US all the best with the upcoming establishment of the lunar base.
they are still factorizing the number 15 :)
Bill Gates, thank you!
I will watch them all.
Somewhere in the hub (where the "tentacles") converge, there is a small fancy 'designer' seating area. Lots of outlets there. When changing planes, I always walk through it.
is the second most important thing. I'd even say it's the first one: I can live without internet, but to work offline I need to charge the laptop.
At most airoports a few outlets in the waiting areas are at best inconveniently located (being designed for plugging cleaning machines rather than for traveller's use), and at worst unavailable. I've spent more than a few strolls down the halls trying to find a free outlet and a seat withing the reach of it.
Depends on how the laptop was packed. Look someday how they have to load the bags into the cargo compartment. Several bags sit atop each other. Some bags have hard edges sticking into other bags. In addition, when the bags are loaded and unloaded, they have to be handled roughly to speed up the process.
To ship safely, all fragile things have to be packed with ample padding on all sides. If you don't pack like this, please accept a high risk of damage.
Propagation of a mechanical wave (i.e., sound) in materials is ultimately field interaction between atoms. Field changes do not propagate faster than c. Actually, the speed of sound is far, far slower than c, because atoms electrically screen each other and the next atom only sees the electric field change after the previous one has moved. The inertia of the atom moving in the field slows down the process quite a bit.
;).
This is my naive (and quite possibly incorrect) understanding of the mechanical wave propagation process. Hope somebody can explain it better
Stop it. No user benefits. They regularly try to lobby these.
Get well-designed fans? Might not worth the trouble for computers, but we get them for self-built scientific equipment with potentially long lab life.
It is obvious from your description your main goal here was to screw over the person filing the patent
Actually, not. The researchers who published this idea openly in 2001 chose to publish openly instead of patenting, so that everyone could use it. If the other guys get a patent, it would place some hurdle on the use of the idea. Those who wanted to use it may not be aware of the 2001 publication. This is one motivation, to protect the invention which has been placed into the public domain. Another motivation was to help the USPTO keep its database clean of patents which are actually non-enforceable. Both should be the tasks of the USPTO, which is a government organization established by the society for serving the needs of this society in general. So, helping it is good, right?
Okay, that was U.S. society, and I am not living in the U.S. Call me irrational, then. Besides, I also had some curiosity in how the system works.