Swiss Scientists Prove Durability of Quantum Network, So what?

Archit Khullar ( 10-ECU-043 ) ECE 5A. So, probably youve already heard of and good and it kept the system secure for a while but the thing is, cracking it is not impossible, just improbable due to limits of computing power. At the time RSA was proposed, it would take a millennium to break a 192-bit encryption by brute force. In 2008, cryptanalysts proved that with the computing power then, it would take only eight months. So what do we do? Well, for one thing, we can raise the key size. Today the industry standard is 192-bits and lots of crossed fingers. But this is a band aid solution.

(most probably

not)- The Institute

Physics and the New Journal of Physics recently released a paper on the long term performance of the SwissQuantumat CERN on field environment. And since I have taken the ambitious task of making all this technical stuff understandable to the average reader, I decided to try and write in less blah blah and more in the way that hopefully youll understand what this means for you. If you still have no idea what cryptography is, congratulations for getting out of that cave youve been hiding in for most of written history. Consider this my welcome present. Simply put, cryptography is secret writing or obscure writing where the message is hidden in such a way that only the right person will be able to read it. It is centered around the idea of a key to unlock the message. Decades ago, mathematicians introduced a new breakthrough in cryptography: oneway functions which lead to Public-key Cryptography. Today, everything that needs to keep your information secure uses a form of cryptography from ATMs, emails, social networks, your mobile to a lot of electronic devices. Now, this is all well

And so the war between cryptographers and cryptanalysts is now on a critical phase. 2 decades ago, theoretical and

Bibliography has been added. Quantum pads have been explained explicitly now. The exploitation by engineers line is removed since I couldnt gather ample info about the year and what exactly they exploited. All I know the system was hacked pretty easily due to their slight ignorance.

experimental physicists joined the war equipped with quantum computers, it mechanics. promises With quantum

cryptanalysts to be able to break todays most powerful Public-key Encryptions. But what quantum mechanics breaks with one state (pun intended) it helps protect with another. With quantum cryptography, it promises provably secure encryptions and the power of one-time pads* without the having to worry about key distribution problems.

before and during World War II and in the Cold War era. On the Internet, the difficulty of securely controlling secret keys led to the invention of public key cryptography. How It Works Typically, a one-time pad is created by generating a string of characters or numbers that will be at least as long as the longest message that may be sent. This string of values is generated in some random fashion - for example, by someone pulling numbered balls out of a lottery machine or by using a computer program with a random number generator. The values are written down on a pad (or any device that someone can read or use). The pads are given to anyone who may be likely to send or receive a message. Typically, a pad may be issued as a collection of keys, one for each day in a month, for example, with one key expiring at the end of each day or as soon as it has been used once. When a message is to be sent, the sender uses the secret key to encrypt each character, one at a time. If a computer is used, each bit in the character (which is usually eight bits in length) is exclusively "OR'ed" with the corresponding bit in the secret key. (With a one-time pad, the encryption algorithm is simply the XOR operation. Where there is some concern about how truly random the key is, it is sometimes combined with another algorithm such as MD5.) One writer describes this kind of encryption as a "100% noise source" used to mask the message. Only the sender and receiver have the means to remove the noise. Once the one-time pad is used, it can't be reused.

*In cryptography, a one-time pad is a system in which a private key generated randomly is used only once to encrypt a message that is then decrypted by the receiver using a matching one-time pad and key. Messages encrypted with keys based on randomness have the advantage that there is theoretically no way to "break the code" by analyzing a succession of messages. Each encryption is unique and bears no relation to the next encryption so that some pattern can be detected. With a one-time pad, however, the decrypting party must have access to the same key used to encrypt the message and this raises the problem of how to get the key to the decrypting party safely or how to keep both keys secure. One-time pads have sometimes been used when the both parties started out at the same physical location and then separated, each with knowledge of the keys in the one-time pad. The key used in a one-time pad is called a secret key because if it is revealed, the messages encrypted with it can easily be deciphered. One-time pads figured prominently in secret message transmission and espionage

Bibliography has been added. Quantum pads have been explained explicitly now. The exploitation by engineers line is removed since I couldnt gather ample info about the year and what exactly they exploited. All I know the system was hacked pretty easily due to their slight ignorance.

If it is reused, someone who intercepts multiple messages can begin to compare them for similar coding for words that may possibly occur in both messages.

Of course,

this

doesnt

mean

that

telecommunication networks will begin using them anytime soon but it is a start in that direction. Apparently, there are some issues about external problems, such

Now, remember this, there is only one perfectly known: Vernam secure cipher cryptosystem or one-time

as power cuts and air conditioning problems. (Did you think youre the only one? QKD layer hates it, too.) Also, QKD is not without faults because even if in theory this is a perfect system, physicists and engineers are working with less than perfect physical systems called real-life. And in real life there is always a margin of error. While quantum computing is still at its infancy and the most ideal equipments to provide the security parallel to that in theory exists only in the physicists mind, efforts at Europe and Los Alamos are still underway to strengthen implementations of Quantum Cryptography. The question is, will real life Quantum Cryptography encryption be as unbreakable as promised by its theoretical counterpart?
BIBLIOGRAPHY References have been taken from

pad. But there is a catch: a pad should never be reused. As long as the pads are unique and never reused no statistical analysis or pattern matching techniques can be applied by cryptanalysts. The fact that the pad can be used only once is the one time point of this cipher. So the biggest problem is, how do you send these pads/keys securely, over the network? Well, folks, that are what our friends at Switzerland had been working on for a year and a half. While Key the Studyon Quantum

Distribution,or QKD (which enables two parties to share a secret key before using that key to protect data they want to send over a network) started with Bennett and Bassard in the 1980s, this paper is one giant step into bringing Quantum Cryptography out of the labs and into the fields. Through a long term study, they have proven that QKD has the maturity to be deployed in telecommunication networks. It has proven its reliability and robustness in a real-life environment outside of the laboratory.

searchsecurity.techtarget.com References have also been taken from various Science org websites that are working on quantum cryptography like

http://news.sciencemag.org/science now/

Bibliography has been added. Quantum pads have been explained explicitly now. The exploitation by engineers line is removed since I couldnt gather ample info about the year and what exactly they exploited. All I know the system was hacked pretty easily due to their slight ignorance.

Bibliography has been added. Quantum pads have been explained explicitly now. The exploitation by engineers line is removed since I couldnt gather ample info about the year and what exactly they exploited. All I know the system was hacked pretty easily due to their slight ignorance.