Spectrum Online—Tomorrows Technology Today
Font Size: A A A

« How Much Water Does It Take to Make Electricity? | Main | Audio Slide Show: How to Convert a Prius to a Plug-In Hybrid »

Quantum Cryptography Cracked?

Swedes find vulnerability in supposedly secure quantum cryptography system

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.fcgi/4557

Comments (3)

Adrian:

It's both cracked and uncracked... until you look at it.

allen m:

Well at wat kind of safety mechanisms will we be safe at? Everything has a reverse process, xpt Life & Death.
am just a beginner of this security issue, but i think its good to know at what levels these mechanism provide security.
Great article.

"The most secure codes currently in use rely on public-key cryptography..." Not so. you correctly state that public-key crypto relies on the difficulty of computing certain mathematical functions. At present, it's not possible to verify how hard these problems actually are, so it's conceivable that a computational breakthrough could come at any time. Most cryptographers would regard strong symmetric key ciphers as providing the "most secure codes". Public-key cryptography is used not because it is more secure, but because it vastly simplifies the problem of key management. Most often it is used only for key generation or key exchange, since it is much slower than symmetric key crypto for bulk encryption and decryption.

Quantum cryptography is analogous to public-key crypto in that its primary use is for key exchange.

There has long been an encryption mechanism that is "unbreakable in theory" - the Vernam cipher, a.k.a the "one-time pad". It's almost never secure in practice due to difficulties of implementation and use, and it appears that quantum cryptography may suffer from a similar flaw.

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on April 30, 2008 4:50 PM.

The previous post in this blog was How Much Water Does It Take to Make Electricity?.

The next post in this blog is Audio Slide Show: How to Convert a Prius to a Plug-In Hybrid.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Powered by Movable Type 3.35
Hosted by LivingDot