Quantum encryption isn’t as unbreakable as you think May 30, 2013 In theory, we’ve had this licked for hundreds of years. We’ve long known how to create totally unbreakable encryption, ciphers so strong that no amount of modern supercomputing power could brute force its way into your grocery list, if you really desired to stop it: just garble it all to hell. That’s really all it takes, and the processes involved in doing so are simple, quick, and easy enough for anyone to use. There really is no flaw on the theory side at all — yet the realities of actually implementing these theories have frustrated everyone from spy agencies to note-passing school children. When it comes to cryptography, the proof is definitely in the pudding Take, for a moment, the simplest possible form of encryption, in which you want to keep information solely to yourself. You don’t need to transmit any key or alternate cipher-text to anyone, removing the single greatest challenge in cryptography, and yet there are still impossible problems. Can you memorize a sufficiently long and perfectly random key for encrypting and decrypting your self-message, preferably a key that’s just as long as your sensitive information itself? If not, then you must store the key somehow, and immediately introduce a glaring security vulnerability. And you certainly can’t generate a truly random sequence off the top of your head, which introduces another chink in the armor. Do you move your lips silently as you go through your cryptographic routine? Could someone have a camera to look over your shoulder as you copy out the intermediate steps? Could someone use classified brain-scanning technology to grab the encryption process straight out of your mind as you practice it? If we can’t devise a practically invulnerable form of encryption when we don’t even need to transmit a message, how could we possibly hope to create an invulnerable form of real communication? Quantum cryptography is often referred to as “perfect” encryption, but this is just shorthand for its cutting-out of the most classically insoluble problem in cryptography: key transmission. There are still a host of other possible vulnerabilities, and now researchers are beginning to find the cracks even in quantum crypto’s single most ballyhooed feature..... extremetech/extreme/156922-quantum-encryption-isnt-as-unbreakable-as-you-think
Posted on: Wed, 24 Jul 2013 21:37:31 +0000
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