'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

[DaKahuna]

Re: 'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker is the person you are referring to.

He's one of them. Jerry Whitworth was another. You should get a couple of beers in me and get me started on those two. The amount of extra work they caused me was phenomenal. Thankfully I was never at the same command as they. I had a friend that was and they flew his ass back from the Indian Ocean to give a deposition and to question him. From what he told me, it was not a fun experience.

I think people look for end all be all product. They want something that states that yes you have arrived and don't have to think about this anymore. No such thing with security. It 's a state where you never quite reach. I could get all Zen about it but I think many people get the point that it's a continuing effort that must be re-evaluated all the time.

Yes, any enterprise encryption system has to have backdoors so that if the user screws something up, the techs can have a possiblity of recovering the information. I get a weekly email from the vendor of our whole disk encryption product with a decryption key that can be used on any disk that was propery encrypted with their product in our enterprise.

[streaker69]

Re: 'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

Yes I agree, that is what happened. But it just goes to show no matter how strong the front door is if you leave the keys lying around or with the wrong people someone will get in.

Which is exactly why we need to remove humans from the equation and go into an fully automated mechanic military force. RoTM.

[xor]

Re: 'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

I think rather than breaking our code, they were given the keys by traitors. I can't go into much detail but I do believe it was later proven that they had access to this inofrmation as a results of someone giving it to them rather than an ability to "break" our crypto systems.

Yes I agree, that is what happened. But it just goes to show no matter how strong the front door is if you leave the keys lying around or with the wrong people someone will get in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker is the person you are referring to.

I think people look for end all be all product. They want something that states that yes you have arrived and don't have to think about this anymore. No such thing with security. It 's a state where you never quite reach. I could get all Zen about it but I think many people get the point that it's a continuing effort that must be re-evaluated all the time.

xor

On a lighter note I think every Infosec guy needs a Love Guru . Yeah, just saw movie On-Demand.

[DaKahuna]

Re: 'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

... <snip> ... ... <snip> ... Also what our Mediterranean Fleet thought during the Cold War. The Soviets had broken our code and pretty much knew every move they made.

I think rather than breaking our code, they were given the keys by traitors. I can't go into much detail but I do believe it was later proven that they had access to this inofrmation as a results of someone giving it to them rather than an ability to "break" our crypto systems.

[bascule]

Re: 'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

There's been some rather boisterous discussion of this in the past.

Also Bruce Schneier says quantum cryptography is pointless

[handle02]

Re: 'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

... why break the xbox encryption when you can read your key in plaintext as the hardware passes it through i/o?

Agreed. I think it's an interresting concept, but it's far from perfect. No one will ever be 100% secure.

[YenTheFirst]

Re: 'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

I also can't see how this would be practically implemented outside of a lab.

That was the point of the article that started this thread. It was a demonstration of what a practical implementation of quantum cryptography might look like.

I expect that once the technology matures, governments and big companies will be using it.

[converge]

Re: 'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

It definitely raises the effort bar for those interested in breaking it .. I don't believe it is unbreakable. It is, however, susceptible to availability flaws as far as your imagination can span.

I also can't see how this would be practically implemented outside of a lab. Surely we would need to breed more cats to have one for every key seed required in the industry. The implementation is usually the weakness ... why break the xbox encryption when you can read your key in plaintext as the hardware passes it through i/o?

[Voltage Spike]

Re: 'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

The whole point is that one can't observe the photons without disturbing them.

YenTheFirst's post is the closest to my understanding of quantum encryption (although like most items labelled "quantum" that meaning changes drastically in context). The encryption is "unbreakable" because an attacker intercepting the message would prevent the target from receiving the message. It's not that an attacker can't decrypt the message, it's that the attacker can't do so without throwing up a giantic red flag in the process.

Please, let's not spawn off into Shrodinger's cat theory. ;)

...yes I'm aware of the Irony of that statement since I already made a joke about it.

We all know you simply want the glory for yourself. So much pride in one person makes me weep.

[streaker69]

Re: 'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

It has been long posited that one cannot observe photons in motion without disturbing their native state.

Please, let's not spawn off into Shrodinger's cat theory. ;)

...yes I'm aware of the Irony of that statement since I already made a joke about it.

[valkyrie]

Re: 'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

It has been long posited that one cannot observe photons in motion without disturbing their native state. Having said that, it would be interesting to attempt a passive capture and play with the results. You aren't missing anything. You are merely basing your hypothesis on what is already known. There is much that we don't yet know and perhaps shan't ever know. I still contend that nothing is truly random, just finding the patterns may be a challenge.

Regards,

valkyrie
_________________________________________
sapere aude

[YenTheFirst]

Re: 'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

...Essentially looking at the photons and recording the sequence without disturbing the travel....

If that were doable, it would defeat the point of quantum cryptography.

The whole point is that one can't observe the photons without disturbing them.


Also, whether the stream is truly random or not is a physics question, or perhaps a metaphysics question, but for the moment it is, as far as we can tell, an unreproducible stream.

So, unless I'm missing something here, it's effectively uncrackable, barring a monumental discovery in physics.
this discovery would have to be either
1) how to violate the uncertainty principle
2) how to reproduce a quantum random event, reliably.

Is there something important I'm missing here?

[streaker69]

Re: 'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

i had actually heard of someone (whom we all know and respect) in the UK who was using a radio tuned to a non-station placed within a Faraday cage to generate static as random as possible to seed crypto operations.

that's an interesting idea for seeding as well, and if you really wanted to cause it to fluctuate even more in randomness you could put a variable voltage spark gap generator in the faraday cage as well. That would cause enough interference/noise on the radio to really make the seeding random.

[Deviant Ollam]

Re: 'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

recording space noise to use as a key for encryption. ... I believe the reason for using space noise was they couldn't find anything more random.

Simple. Nothing is truly random. Given time, computing power and AHAH moments, nothing is impossible to replicate. If you are interested, investigate NASA's work on repeated audio patterns from space noise.

i had actually heard of someone (whom we all know and respect) in the UK who was using a radio tuned to a non-station placed within a Faraday cage to generate static as random as possible to seed crypto operations.

I wonder if that would be more or less replicable than the outer space solution. At this point, it all gets rather academic for me (and, quite turly, over my head as well) since the notion of breaking super strong crypto fascinates me but the math and computing power and just the general operations involved are beyond me, both in terms of my grasping the matter and in terms of something i'd ever actually have to / want to do.

[SarperDomain]

Re: 'Unbreakable' encryption unveiled....

As for the security on it I'm thinking:
Portable high powered passive ion microscope on the fiberwire.
Essentially looking at the photons and recording the sequence without disturbing the travel. Then playback and slowdown the frames and translate into binary, then start hashing away.
But, then again, I am very tired right now and can't think straight.