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Thread: Uncrackable network

  1. #1
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    Uncrackable network

    http://www.forbes.com/home/enterpris...05quantum.html

    NEW YORK - In Cambridge, Mass., not too far from the Charles River, which cuts near Harvard and M.I.T., David Pearson is attempting to build an un-hackable network.
    an interesting read...

    involves quantam cryptography... may interest some people here

  2. #2
    They call me the Hunted foxyloxley's Avatar
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    If someone is eavesdropping, they introduce errors into the communications," Pearson says. "If that happens we just throw the keys away and start over
    The answer is quantum cryptography, which harnesses quantum physics to create encryption keys that are all but impossible to crack because they are rendered useless by simply looking at them. Data using those keys is simply resent using new keys.
    The basic theme of the Quantum world, if you observe - you destroy.............

    To help comprehend it, consider a snooker table, with a red ball moving from one end to the other, this is the message. To intercept it, you have to launch [white] balls from the side and observe these, when one [white] collides with the message [red] it releases energy, which is detected. But the message [red] has now been knocked off its path, and will not make it to the receiver, the message is lost.

    For some major league headaches, try reading up on any aspect of the quantum world.
    I find the author John Gribben to give an 'easier' path through the puzzles presented.
    so now I'm in my SIXTIES FFS
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  3. #3
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    funny "un-hackable" !
    just because something is encrypted doesn't make it secure. Ceasar's shift code was cracked, 56-bit was cracked, DES was cracked, ssh was cracked, ssl was cracked, the list goes on and on..

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    I think what David Pearson is trying to create is an "Un-Crackable" network, not an Un-Hackable one.
    You can tell I'm from old school when those two terms mean completely different things.

    Personally, I think we'd make huge leaps and bounds if we can obtain a greater degree of human security, not technological security.
    Humans, the social network, is our greatest security weakness.
    ZT3000
    Beta tester of "0"s and "1"s"

  5. #5
    AO Ancient: Team Leader
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    funny "un-hackable"
    If you thought about it for a millsecond you wouldn't have made that comment...

    Think about this... If you view the packet it is changed... A single packet.... So encryption isn't really relevant is it? If you can crack and encryption scheme from a single packet then it really isn't an encryption scheme. The fact that encryption keys would be re-exchanged _if_ a packet was viewed it would be a sensible to attempt a keychange because you _know_ you are being watched.....

    The concepts in quantum computing aren't new but they will change many things radically - for example: a password that would take 1000 years to crack by brute force would take a year or less to crack using quantum computing... Now that changes encryption schemes doesn't it?
    Don\'t SYN us.... We\'ll SYN you.....
    \"A nation that draws too broad a difference between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting done by fools.\" - Thucydides

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    Somebody sent me a similar article ( http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7394350/ ). Something to the effect of what bracket said, throughout history there has been the rivalry between cryptographers and cryptoanalysts. Ciphers began being done on paper. There was caesar's code, polyalphabetical substitutions, computer powered ciphers... quantum cryptography is just another step up. I replied to the person with this:

    Man is imperfect. The code is imperfect. The cipher can be cracked. It's transitive.

    I find quantum computer highly interesting and look forward to seeing the results of its positive application.

  7. #7
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    hmmm it was an intresting read however I have a question

    If someone is eavesdropping, they introduce errors into the communications," Pearson says. "If that happens we just throw the keys away and start over
    now both ends need to know the key right? (that is the transmitter and the reciver) and im assuming there is a finite amount of keys, and if the system moves to a new key if its being evesdropped then isnt it possible for the network to run out of keys? I mean sure more could be transmitted but if someone was still evesdropping the line from what i gather the reciving end wouldnt get them and even if they did then the evesdropper would now have the key so wouldnt a second secure method of transmition be required?

    anyone who understands this topic better than me could you please clarify/correct me here, also if what im saying is correct could a second quantumly encrypted line be used aswell, so if one line gets tapped then new keys are transmitted on the second line and then the first line switchs over to the newly transmitted keys?

    also if there wasnt another way (which im sure the probably is) would it be possible to DOS a network by just evesdropping it untill it ran out of keys?

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    My issue of Scientific American, Cover story for Jan 2005, page 79:

    Best-Kept Secrets
    Unbreakable Quantum Encryption has arrived.


    [An excerpt]

    At the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratory, Charles Bennett is known as a brilliant theoretician--one of the fathers of the emerging field of quantum computing. Like many theorists, he has not logged much experience in the laboratory. His absentmindedness in relation to the physical world once transformed the color of a teapot from green to red when he left it on a double boiler too long. But in 1989 Bennett and colleagues John A. Smolin and Gilles Brassard cast caution aside and undertook a groundbreaking experiment that would demonstrate a new cryptography based on the principles of quantum mechanics.

    The team put together an experiment in which photons moved down a 30-centimeter channel in a light-tight box called "Aunt Martha's coffin." The direction in which the photons oscillated, their polarization, represented the 0s or 1s of a series of quantum bits, or qubits. The qubits constituted a cryptographic "key" that could be used to encrypt or decipher a message. What kept the key from prying eavesdroppers was Heisenberg's uncertainty principle--a foundation of quantum physics that dictates that the measurement of one property in a quantum state will perturb another. In a quantum cryptographic system, any interloper tapping into the stream of photons will alter them in a way that is detectable to the sender and the receiver. In principle, the technique provides the makings of an unbreakable cryptographic key.

    They go on to describe the generic process, talk about Quantum computers, and end with short discussion on vulnerabilities.
    ZT3000
    Beta tester of "0"s and "1"s"

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    Side Note on David Pearson article:
    "If someone is eavesdropping, they introduce errors into the communications," Pearson says. "If that happens we just throw the keys away and start over."
    I just LOVE it!!
    What a great idea for an encryption process that is so high tech, so secretive, so advanced that it's still vulnerable to a old Denial of Service attack by a snooper literally doing nothing but just being there.

    Simply sniff the communications channel, looking for nothing and storing nothing in particular (just be there) and the keys keep getting thrown away so the REAL communications never happen.

    Gotta love technology.

    ZT3000
    Beta tester of "0"s and "1"s"

  10. #10
    Originally posted here by Tiger Shark The concepts in quantum computing aren't new but they will change many things radically - for example: a password that would take 1000 years to crack by brute force would take a year or less to crack using quantum computing... Now that changes encryption schemes doesn't it?
    Ahh... Theoretical Physics, my favorite. Actually, we're talking a lot faster than that! With Quantum computation a simple problem could be solved in seconds, that same problem would take the worlds current fastest supercomputer clusters billions of years to solve. My cousin who's in his ninth year of college has been in the nanolabs manipulating the spin of an individual electron inside a quantum dot, which would make a great candidate for quantum information processing because of its rather long coherence time.

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