EU To Counter Echelon With Quantum Cryptography? 465
jfruhlinger writes "An article on Security.ITWorld.com seems to outline a coming information arms race. The European Union has decided to respond to the Echelon project by funding research into supposedly unbreakable quantum cryptography that will keep EU data out of Echelon's maw. Leaving aside the question of whether such a thing is possible, the political implications are troubling, indicating a widening rift within the Western world. Interestingly, the UK is part of the EU, but its intelligence services are among Echelon's sponsors."
What I do is.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What I do is.... (Score:5, Funny)
I often enjoy sending such things are core dumps or font files (or maybe plans for a planet-buster nuke, I fergit) compressed twice using two different out dated compression programs (say, ARC on a PC and then ShrinkIt [NuFX] on an Apple II), strip off the archive ID header, UUencode it, strip off the leading cap M's, cut it in half, paste it second half first into an email, and send it with a subject line with likely Echelon trigger words, adding "PS: Call me for the key to decode this." If encryption is outlawed, only
a8e3 5m0w s3k1 5d9k
b7f2 7k1l c9r4 3yr5.
Re:What I do is.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What I do is.... (Score:3, Funny)
Be carefull! If your have a relatively good microphone, you could send sensitive data!
Have a look at this: Breaking RSA Keys by Listening to Your Computer [slashdot.org] ;-)
Re:What I do is.... (Score:3, Funny)
On slashdot?
Re:What I do is.... (Score:5, Funny)
I think this time-dilatation technique has been called 'Ed's relativistic document delivery' in that company I used to work. I just called it 'creativity by necessity'.
Re:What I do is.... (Score:3, Informative)
Encryption is illegal in China, and its use is guaranteed to at least provoke interest by authorities. This is why stegonagraphy has proved to be popular among human rights and anti-Chinese government groups.
Re:What I do is.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, when they start demonstrating that they can make use of the enormous amount of information they already have, then maybe I'll consider giving them more.
Instead they seem to produce a large amount of bullshit a lot of the time. Far as I can see the NSA and other 'intelligence agencies' around the world are full of creeps and lamers who get off on the idea of pr
Re:I've heard... (Score:4, Insightful)
Catching a terrorist, or "unlawful combatant" or whatever the mot-du-jour is, using this technology, will NOT become common knowledge, since it's not like terrorists get anything resembling a fair and open trial on their island resort in the carribean, is it?
Not that I think they can break it quite that fast, at least not in bulk.
Uh oh... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Uh oh... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Uh oh... (Score:4, Funny)
Unbeatable Encryption! (Score:5, Funny)
What is it? It goes by the name 'French'...
Re:Unbeatable Encryption! (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this just 'security through obscurity', or was there something else involved.
Re:Unbeatable Encryption! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Unbeatable Encryption! (Score:5, Informative)
Earlier, in World War I, the US Army utilized members of the Choctaw tribe [essortment.com] as operators near the end of the war. This, however, was due to a decision in the field (a captain noted that he had several members of the tribe in his battalion), rather than a formal program.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Unbeatable Encryption! (Score:5, Informative)
So, even if a few Japanese operators did learn Navajo, they wouldn't be able to spoof their way onto the network. Kinda like trying to read the state of a photon without blowing the secret, maybe.
Throw in the fact that the Japanese probably didn't care at all about the various tribes, even if they did know what a Navajo was, and you have a tough nut to crack. The war didn't last long enough for them to adapt.
I remember watching some TV special about the code talkers, and one of the old guys was practically laughing when he was telling his story. Good stuff.
Re:Unbeatable Encryption! (Score:5, Funny)
I remember watching some TV special about the code talkers, and one of the old guys was practically laughing when he was telling his story.
When NASA was preparing for the Apollo project, they did some astronaut training on a Navajo Indian reservation. One day, a Navajo elder and his son were herding sheep and came across the space crew. The old man, who spoke only Navajo, asked a question which his son translated. "What are these guys in the big suits doing?"
A member of the crew said they were practicing for their trip to the moon. The old man got all excited and asked if he could send a message to the moon with the astronauts.
Recognizing a promotional opportunity for the spin-doctors, the NASA folks found a tape recorder. After the old man recorded his message, they asked the son to translate it. He refused.
So the NASA reps brought the tape to the reservation where the rest of the tribe listened and laughed but refused to translate the elder's message to the moon.
Finally, the NASA crew called in an official government translator. He reported that the moon message said, "Watch out for these guys; they have come to steal your land."
The interesting case of the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
The UK has its butt sitting on 2 chairs. On one hand they sort of behave like a US state, with Tony as governor, and on the other as a half-willing EU member, in large part thanks to Mrs Thatcher. One of these days they'll have to decide which continent they want to be part of.
And I have a feeling that, if the population has a say, they'll embrace the EU eventually. Of course, the population rarely has a true say in any country though...
Re:The interesting case of the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The interesting case of the UK (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The interesting case of the UK (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The interesting case of the UK (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The interesting case of the UK (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally given the fact that the UK is the driving force behind software patents in the EU, I wil be voting against the government and against anything EU-centric in the upcoming elections. I don't see that it's at all democratic for the EU parliament (I think) to decide amendments need to be made, then the EU Council of ministers to ride roughshod over the whole thing. Go Germany, I wish the UK government had half the cluebat you wield....
I wonder if the UK gets a net gain from being in Europe, I really do. Consider if we *did* become the 51st state. The real problem would be that the US people would never accept it - we have 56 million people, the US has 260 million. If the Uk became a state, it would represent 1/6 the population of the USA, never mind the influence the commonwealth brings in... The Whitehouse would have to be relocated to 10 Downing St. Can't see it myself... Empire by default - never happen, given our history...
Simon
Re:The interesting case of the UK (Score:3, Informative)
Apples and oranges, unless I missed the part where half the UK was recently repatriated after decades of Communist rule and mismanagement. On second thought....
Re:The interesting case of the UK (Score:5, Informative)
Where did you get those numbers? According to this week's Economist, the rate is 4.7% in Britain and 8.8% in the Euro area. The UK rate is still extremely low, but not as exaggerated as you stated.
Re:The interesting case of the UK (Score:4, Interesting)
And calling Britian the 51st state is just wrong. For a start, most of us object to the US, and so do most of the Foreign Office. The sympathy to the US is due to long standing ties, like us running you, and the fact we speak the same language. We try and imagine ourself as a bridge between the two continents. Not that that really works...
Re:The interesting case of the UK (Score:3, Insightful)
If they had to choose one or the other, I suspect that most people in the UK would rather be European.
Re:The interesting case of the UK (Score:4, Informative)
Half-willing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Thatcher wasn't pro Europe (Score:5, Informative)
Mrs Thatcher was distinctly anti-Euro, apart from free trade and good relations which follows the last referendum the UK had. It was the Major years (Maastricht treaty and in then out of the ERM) followed by Blair who pursued the closer ties.
Despite being promised a referendum on the EU constitution (which is a woeful hack of previous revisions), the British public hasn't been given a date on it... and the trust (read as 'lack of') I have in Blair is as such that he would do the referendum after the point of no return (sorry people if you voted 'no', it's too late now!).
I for one would like the closer ties with Europe (i.e. what we have now), but what is proposed I think is too much too soon... and there are too many problems which really need sorting first (red tape, beaurocracy, politicians voting in new laws when they have no clue as to what they are, etc etc). Added to that the majority of the British public need to know exactly what is going on, and what will happen before we're even semi happy with it.
I've always been of liberal views and what you would call a floating voter, but I wouldn't trust the Lib Dems (almost wanting to powershare with Labour, no real manifesto), I definately don't trust Blair.... but despite his previous convictions I think the Conservatives are in a much stronger position with Howard (especially regarding party unity).
Maybe the biggest problem that'll hit us in a couple of years is the national debt (where the conservatives saved a crap load of money by taxing the country half to death - mind Labour were happy to add to that) and the housing prices/issues, add to that the amount of money being literally thrown at the NHS is a nice little ticking time bomb that I'm not looking forward to going off.
Anyway, most opinion/info in this post is AFAIK and is open to correction/counter viewpoints... as they say (damn this zippy led US keyboard), just my 0.02 UK Sterling (yes I do know about character map, I just can't be arsed!).T-Kir
The Logical Choice for Britain (Score:3, Insightful)
At that point they will adopt the euro, which will cause serious reverberations on Wall Street. Remember that the balance of trade deficit in the US can only be sustained as long as capital from Asia and Europe keeps flowing into the US at a rate of $1 B / day. The US ought to create a strategy to hold Britain else a huge amount of British capital is going to flow into European markets when
Quantum Encryption? (Score:5, Informative)
The aim is to produce a communication system that cannot be intercepted by anyone
If I understand their intent, they plan to use concepts like Quantum Entanglement to ensure that communication is shared only between the entangled particles. This is a very different concept from using the properties of Quantum Mechanics to scramble information in a reversible manner or creating computers capable of super-fast calculations.
Re:Quantum Encryption? (Score:5, Informative)
Hence, if you really want to gripe about the name, I suppose you could call it quantum key distribution.
Re:Quantum Encryption? (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no such things as "a key for a one time pad". The one time pad is the key. The needed part of the pad is also as long as the message itself, so you can't save anything by transmitting the pad excerpt instead of the message itself.
Re:Quantum Encryption? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Quantum Encryption? (Score:3, Informative)
encrypt ( P ) Pronunciation Key (n-krpt)
tr.v. encrypted, encrypting, encrypts
1. To put into code or cipher.
2. Computer Science. To alter (a file, for example) using a secret code so as to be unintelligible to unauthorized parties.
according to this it seems like a perfect name to me. you are coding the information into quantum states so it can't be intercepted by people you don't want it to.
Re:Quantum Encryption? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Quantum Encryption? (Score:4, Insightful)
As a matter of fact, you probably couldn't communicate reliably with quantum-based communication, much less quantum encryption or using quantum entanglement to communicate securely, as you hinted.
Also, I want to add a note that I personally think it shouldn't be called Quantum Encryption but "Quantum Key Distribution"(QKD), as it is a much better name for it. They use the property of quantum mechanics to exchange a key which allows them to use the one-time pad method to encrypt the message, which MUCH less logistical problems, and no way to intercept the key. The encryption algorithm is purely classical and not quantum-based. This makes QKD in such a way that it allows 2 people to communicate without anyone being able to intercept the keys with any known attacks/methods(timed, man-in-the-middle, etc.), they can only prevent them from exchanging a key and thus communicating(which in some case might be worst tho).
Quantum *Intrusion Detection* (Score:4, Informative)
All it can do is tell you if your message is being intercepted. Now, this is useful information, since you might decide to quickly stop transmitting, and if you're fast enough on the draw and using conventional encryption on top of your Quantum Intrusion Detection, then you'll probably not give enough data to the intruder for them to feasibly decrypt anything.
But note that if you want the protection of encryption so the intruder doesn't get plaintext, you still need to use conventional encryption.
Also note that some wild-eyed Slashdot types who's understanding of technology is buzzword-deep sometimes make the claim that Quantum Computing might crack Quantum Encryption. Nope, because "Encryption" isn't. And the very nature of the Intrusion Detection is that you can't get around it, no matter how clever you are.
The worst part of this stupid naming is that some day we probably really will have some sort of encryption that uses QM, and then what we will call that?
Anyways, it is apparently far too late to do anything about this misnomer, but it's one of the most pernicious misnomers I've seen in modern times. Whoever named this technology should have their relevant degrees stripped.
Re:Quantum *Intrusion Detection* (Score:5, Insightful)
First, it's not Quantum Intrusion Detection. It's Quantum Key Distribution. It allows 2 people to exchange a randomly generated key as long as the message, used in a one-time pad scheme.
They trick is that the exchange of the key is unconditionally secure. Not only does it tells you when part of the key is intercepted, it also 'aborts'. The only thing an eavesdropper can do is to prevent you from communicating. If the communication is successful, then no one eavesdropped or got enough information on the key to jeopardize the exchange.
This is the beauty of it.
So no, it's not Quantum Encryption per see, as the encryption is done in classical term using one-time pad method, but it's not Quantum Intrusion Detection either. It's a very ingenious mix of both quantum and classical method which results in an unconditionally secure method of encryption.
And, I'd have to talk about Gilles Brassard(he teaches at the "Universite de Montreal" where I study). about stripping his degrees, as he's the co-inventor of quantum encryption and computing in general. I think he'd laugh but agree that Quantum Encryption is the resulting solution, not the means. "Encryption using quantum principles" might be more revelent, but quite longuer. Quantum Key Distribution is my personal favorite.
Re:Quantum *Intrusion Detection* (Score:3, Insightful)
What I find disturbing is... (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be naive, but if you want respect you have to give respect.
Re:What I find disturbing is... (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't possibly question the motives of a country trying to protect against spies from friendly countries, when those friendly countries actually ARE spying on them.
Re:What I find disturbing is... (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I understand they are, but its scarier than you think. The US is not, in many instances, allowed to spy on its own citizens, so it makes use of any ally to do it for them. This means they get round any privacy issues. In return the US spies on the UK to give the UK information on their own citizens.
This based on what I have been told. If anyone has anything to prove or disprove this, please share here.
Re:What I find disturbing is... (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be naive, but if you want respect you have to give respect.
There's no "may" to it, it's incredibly naive. Yep, the US spies on it's allies--but if you believe that those allies are not spying on the US in turn, you're dreaming. Charles de Gaulle once said that nations do not have friends--only interests. That's as true today as it was then.
Re:What I find disturbing is... (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a link, [heise.de] but you can google 'echelon australia' for more info
Re:What I find disturbing is... (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember over a decade ago when I actually worked in a business in which we were espionage aware, that the number one espionage problem in the US was the French (followed by the Chinese, and then a laundry list of European countries -- including the UK), the French being primarily interested in stealing US weapons technology and listening in on business deals they were competing with. Which was primarily a business move; along with the Russians and the US, the French are one of the world's major arms exporting countries and they have to compete with US designed weapons on the open market.
Everyone spies on everyone, and for varying reasons. The French actually used to have one of the most aggressive intelligence services on the globe, disproportionate to their size and geopolitical importance, which some people find surprising. I don't know if it as large today, though. But this is nothing new, and all the governments understand that this goes on. As long as it doesn't get out of hand, it is tolerated between countries that are nominally friendly.
Re:Well Duh (Score:3, Insightful)
who cares about tiny scraps of information like this when you're ignoring 1000 ft danger signs such as the 9/11 hijakers learning to fly in the US and specifically saying they don't care about learning how to land?
Re:Well Duh (Score:3, Insightful)
"The political implications are troubling"? (Score:5, Insightful)
If there is a "growing rift" in the Western hemisphere, who the fuck do you think is responsible for this -- the ones who are pissed off about the eavesdropping and are trying to do something to stop it (and think for a moment about the fact that they're trying encryption rather than attempting to convince the US et al. that it's a Bad Thing...what does that tell you about their chances of actually convincing anyone to stop anything?), or the countries and intelligence agencies that decided this was acceptable in the first place?
Sorry for the shouting, but this intellectual coyness does not become you.
Re:"The political implications are troubling"? (Score:3, Insightful)
In international politics, allies have a way of becoming enemies when it serves their purposes; as long as the tiniest possibility of a conflict exists, countries will always look after their own interests first, and those of their (current) allies second.
That sounds kind of silly (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I don't think people realize how strong cryptography is today. There are cryptographic methods available to the public at large (such as RC5 and PGP) that are proven to require more computing power than is theoretically possible in the universe. Not just more computing power than is possible with current hardware, but the theoretical limits of computation given the entire resources of the universe. So really, it seems that a lot of ignorance is at play here, and I would hope someone clueful in the EU informs their EU government before they go off and waste a whole lot of taxpayer money on such a foolish project.
Re:That sounds kind of silly (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That sounds kind of silly (Score:5, Interesting)
We can't even be certain that the NSA doesn't have quantum computers, although this is less likely. When your attacker has a non-deterministic computer, you're fairly screwed on finding an algorithm that can be efficiently encoded and decoded on deterministic machines while taking extraordinarily long to decrypt without the key. The only saving grace here is that a quantum computer may not be a general non-deterministic machine, so there may be some things that a non-deterministic machine can do that a quantum computer cannot. To my knowledge, the equivalence between quantum computers and non-deterministic machines has not been proven either positively or negatively. I'm sure the NSA knows though.
Re:That sounds kind of silly (Score:3, Insightful)
No such proof exists. The best publicly known attacks may be computationally infeasible, and we may be given confidence based on our experience trying (and failing) to find more effective attacks. they are computationally infeasible to break. But noone has a proof of their strength, and it's always possible that dramatic adv
Re:That sounds kind of silly (Score:3, Informative)
Well, this is just wrong. QKD(Quantum Key Ditribution) isn't 'supposedly' unbreakable, it is unconditionally secure and as been proved so many times. I hate to use this argument, but it is true to some extend: you'd have to break the rules of nature to break it.
However to say th
Re:That sounds kind of silly (Score:3, Informative)
Oh dear, fallen into own trap have you. PGP and the public key crypto it's based on is in no way proven
The UK's role in the EU (Score:5, Insightful)
Oi, Blair! Sort it out.
Re:The UK's role in the EU (Score:4, Informative)
The interesting thing is that the majority of people in all of these countries are against the Iraqi war.
Re:The UK's role in the EU (Score:5, Insightful)
That is not true. Anybody who knows Europe will be able to tell you that the Iraq war made a huge difference.
While before, a tiny minority was anti-American, it seems to have grown to the vast majority only because of the Iraq war. Anti-Americanism has now become so pervasive in the European society, that I even hear it in remarks from my kids. And they are at an age (8) when their views are ultra-conservative, and they would only express things that are shared by a significant majority in the school yard.
Believe me, Americans are only fooling themselves if they ignore the damage this war (or this administration) has done to their country.
Anti-american kids (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as things continue as they are going, I'm sorry folks, but the US is going to be less and less respected in Europe. Unfortunately, people will also begin (continue?) to blur the line between the government and people.
In fact, I would be more Anti-American than I am now, were it not for making some American friends last year (during the Iraq invasion of all times!) and going over to the US for the first time to visit.
People will easily forget all the great and wonderful things about the US. Hatred and ill-feeling is much more persuasive.
The US government's direction needs to change. Probably more than just switching to Kerry! (A more democratic voting system would be a good start!)
Re:The UK's role in the EU (Score:3, Insightful)
Europeans do not have anything against legal, UN sanctioned milit
Re:The UK's role in the EU (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand people might disagree about ways to remove/contain a dangerous dictator but to completely turn this issue into US hate-fest is something completely different.
Ok, second point first. The anti-americanism in my view (as a belgian citizen) could more appropriately be called anti-bushism. My 16yo sister wants to go to the US, because she thinks it's a great country, but George W. Bush is number one on her hate list. So, no, from my perspective there is no US hate-fest. This might be different in other countries though. I can imagine the french not being happy with how they have been treated over the past few years.
As to wanting better relations with Saddam than with the US. Do you honestly believe that? It is just plain silly. The problem Europe had was not that they thought we should all be friends with Saddam, it was that war should be a last resort. The reason given prior to the Iraq invasion, weapons of mass destruction, was generally known over here to be a bogus reason. Even if there were wmd's (which we now know there weren't) then it would have been better to let the UN inspectors find them. Instead, the US went on a pointless and unfounded smear campaign against the inspectors (on-going to this day), and then said that war was the only way to get things done in iraq, which was a lie. As an aside, do you believe Saddam was an immediate threat to the US, and if so, why?
After the war, the reason given became iraqi freedom, but at the same time we're seeing the iraqi's do not have control over their own natural resources (oil production and profits are entirely in US hands), do not have control over their own financial resources (all the government money is in US hands), and do not have control over the political decisions taken (a power which is supposed to be handed over soon, but nobody knows to whom, and the resources to use that power aren't coming along with it). Not to mention that if you hold iraq as the standard for countries in need of liberation, you need to go liberate half the world, including current US allies, like China (which is a dictatorship with a horrible human rights record, and a history of invading other countries, just like Iraq).
The US is the most powerful democracy in the world, and as a result, the EU holds it to a very high standard. We expect moral leadership from the US, and the whole Iraq situation is such a disgrace to the US that we have problems understanding why the American public would back an administration that makes such poor decisions. The loud criticism of the US you've heard is our way of saying "we expect better of you, now go do something about it!"
Europe is not US ally anymore.
Europe definitely wants to be a US ally, but the Bush administration has made it really really hard, with all kinds of anti-european economic policies (which is being called a "trade war" in the international press), a unilateral withdrawal from many treaties which Europe considers crucial (Kyoto, the international criminal court, the treaties on chemical and biological weapons, the nuclear disarmament treaties, and so on...), and a general smear campaign against any EU country which dares voice political opposition ("that's old europe", remember that one?).
You have to treat people with respect to get respect back. All the US needs to do to have a strong ally in Europe is to do what it claims to stand for.
I still remember Aznar speech in which he described the secret rejoicing of various Europeans politicians he witnessed in the months after 9/11 - especially of the " that's what you get for supporting Israel" type.
I never heard that. If he did say it, and if it is true, then I wouldn't be surprised by it. 9/11 IS a direct consequence of US middle east policy over the last few decades. Osama himself has said the primary reason for him was the US mili
Re:The UK's role in the EU (Score:4, Insightful)
but i somehow missed that iraq was an us state.
Terrorists (Score:3, Interesting)
And exactly how are they going to tell terrorists from normal workers at a company where they installed this crypto thingy? Of course, the admins could monitor the users, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of the encryption in the first place.
Also, how are they going to implement this? Will they have to replace/addparalell all the current infranetstructure with new photon-cables or something?!
I don't get it ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it ... (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:History on stage. (Score:3, Insightful)
How it came to pass... (Score:5, Funny)
Pure snake oil (Score:3, Insightful)
QC doesn't even prevent a man-in-the-middle attack. All you need to do is splice your tap in to the fibre (or whatever) and do QC with the two ends.
Paul.
Buzzwords (Score:5, Insightful)
If conventional encryption and transmission is deemed sufficiently secure for transmitting the messages, a quantum exchange of keys does not add significantly to the security of the communication. It would surely be easier and cheaper to organize physical transfer of one-time pads than to install all the necessary infrastructure to support the key exchange.
The EP were obviously taken in by buzzwords, but at least the research will advance the state of the art.
You Have Quantum Mail! (Score:3, Funny)
bfsjhbdfhsidhfdhikerhfkihreki
hsfdiurhfiuheriughiurehgierhiytiuwejlkjPiefjih
h
yqte
khsgiuhrgiuh
dgbkidfhgiobnvkjdhbiv
Decryption Commencing... Please Wait...
This may take a few minutes....
You may wish to grab a coffee
ERROR! Cannot decrypt!
Bush: Well gosh, I guess them Yuropiens have got Weapons of Mass Distruction!
Bush leaves the office...
Retrying decryption... Decryption complete!
Message reads:
RE: Bush's IQ
From: Tony Blair
To: Paul Martin
Bush really is an idiot, isn't he?
Signed,
Blair
PS: What do you think of the new encryption program we desgined. It is uncrackable!
Useless until they have quantum routers (Score:4, Insightful)
Until Linksys sells a consumer quantum WAN interface, CISCO sells quantum Layer 3 switches, and all the telcos fiber-up with quantum crypto repeaters, the whole system is vulnerable to snooping.
Quantum routers and encrytion franchises (Score:3, Interesting)
You may be right, but CANNOT is pretty strong language. I can see that one cannot "read" the data without collapsing the wavefunction, but I wonder if one cannot create further entanglements that copy the information or otherwise permit manipulation of the data streams inside a s
Secure Systems (Score:5, Informative)
Mass encryption (Score:3, Insightful)
In other news .. (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone else notice that no one in the U.S. of A knows what Echelon is? I've asked co-worker after co-worker, relative after relativc, friend after friend
What is this 10 years now that I've been raving about it. And not once EVER has there been at least a little 15 second side spot , or ticker note at the bottom about Echelon.
Love my Country:Fear my Government
Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't care about online privacy. I'm not worried about government spooks sifting through my e-mail or web surfing habits and finding out that I like brunettes with long legs, long hair, and almond shaped eyes. It really doesn't concern me. If it were some supercomputer sitting in a back room chewing through e-mail looking for "homicide, suicide, terror, assassinate, secret, password, 9/11" or some other stupid set of keywords or tracing kiddie porn that'd be fine by me. At least until the anti-pr0n people decide that moral righteousness has no bounds and start coming after willing adults with no real sex life and a speedy net connection.
Face it. We live in the real world. People in power let it go to their heads and they often use it for purposes other than those in which it was given to them for.
What I'm worried about is that the guy down the block is an FBI agent. Or CIA. Or NSA. Or some local politician who knows one. One day I'm walking down the street and a candy wrapper drops out of my pocket onto his lawn. Now this guy is such a straight laced Bible thumping tight a__ POS that he uses his political muscle to find out who I am and begin harassing me. "He dropped a candy wrapper on my lawn! He's a litterer! He's no good for society! Besides, I saw him carrying home a six-pack of beer! He must be an alcoholic as well!"
Where's the check and balance? There is none. Who could prove it? No one. Who can stop it? No one.
Echelon, Big Brother surveillance, the Anti-Terror bill. They all suck for the same reason that the Windows registry sucks: there's no way to secure them from people misusing them to hijack the system.
Re:Missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
The psychology behind the "something to hide" confrontation is to put the target at a disadvantage due to shame or guilt. It's a passive-aggressive attack mechanism meant to prey on people with guilty consciences. If the target has transcended the guilt and shame that society has built into them then the attack has no effect.
Incidentally your advice here is ill founded and could get people into trouble.
Two Books to understanding Echelon (Score:5, Informative)
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" [amazon.com] by James Bamford is a fantastic history of the NSA from the end of WWII to the present. If you read this book you will see that the idea that the NSA is spying on UN delegations is really a given...in fact one of the primary reasons the US wanted the UN to locate in NYC is to allow easy interception of diplomatic communications. This author uncovered many amazing Cold War programs and anticdotes and presents them in fascinating form.
The second book is "Blind Mans Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage" [amazon.com]
by Sherry Sontag, another fantastic book of solid research and good story telling, a large amount of it revolving around underwater communication wiretap activities. The special mission nuclear submarine SSN-21 USS Jimmy Carter is out there specially equipped for undersea cable tapping operations and receiving commendations in the tradition of the Cold War era USS Halibut [earthlink.net].
Whatever you think of the ethics of these issues, the technology and history is amazing, and the capabilities do exist and are fairly well documented. If you read these two books, and have the technological understanding to extrapolate a bit, you can get a pretty good picture of current capabilities and the culture of how these collection assets are being used. One thing you will find that they are not being used without limits and elements of responsibility, although there are cases (like the Boeing/Airbus bidding incident) where they have been abused.
-braddock gaskill
One more good book to add... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Two Books to understanding Echelon (Score:3, Interesting)
healthy competition (Score:3, Interesting)
"Good fences make good neighbors."
- Robert Frost, "Mending Wall" [bartleby.com]
No political implications (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this development need not be regarded with any sort of alarmism.
Is it possible? (Score:3, Informative)
Possible? It [aip.org] has [wikipedia.org] been [bbc.co.uk] done. [dartmouth.edu]
I think the poster is confusing using quantum codes (first demostrated in 1991, currently commercially available) with breaking codes with quantum computers (still hugely theoretical).
Re:Measures and counter-measures (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Measures and counter-measures (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Measures and counter-measures (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Measures and counter-measures (Score:3, Interesting)
It's based on the fact that you can not clone a quantum state. That's a law of nature and not some opinion. That means Quantum Cryptography is unbreakable. Period. (The implementation may be breakable but the underlying principle is 100% safe)
Re:Sounds stupid... (Score:3, Interesting)
Preventing eavesdropping of even the ciphertext reduces the loss if the adversary gets a key.
Re:Sounds stupid... (Score:5, Insightful)
It was not unreasonable for them to have suspected so. The integrity of Enigma relied heavily on keeping the machines and codebooks out of allied hands - had the Germans known that the allies had managed to get ahold of those things, the impressive effort of Turing & co. to go the last bit would not have been inconceivable to his German counterparts.
If the NSA can really crack any of our modern cryptographical methods, then they are at least forty fifty years ahead of the rest of world in both mathematics and computing. Is that conceivable? And if they are, then they can't really do anything with what they find anyways, since they would have to spend most of their energy keeping the secret.
Basically you are trying to score cheap points (read karma) but making a comparison that doesn't hold, but that plays on peoples emotions. It's the equivalent of responding to any comment advocating avoiding war with: "That's what Chamberlain thought."
Re:ummm... (Score:5, Informative)
a. Quantum crypto is invulnerable to a monkey-in-the-middle attack. Poorly implemented SSL is vulnerable to MITM during key exchange.
2. It is widely accepted lore on the Internet, and strongly suspected by respectable people, that there exist quantum computing devices capable of factoring extremely large numbers. If this is true, any form of public-key crypto goes to shit.
iii. Part of the problem with cryptography is that it does nothing to hide the source and destination of the data exchange. In theory, a secure quantum crypto system can't be tapped in the first place, so in theory, sender and reciever are anyonymous.
IV. H.323 is for godless commies.
Re:ummm... (Score:5, Informative)
There is also the discrete log problem, which is what DSA uses. I don't pretend to be a cryptographer, or even know really what the discrete log problem involves (no google links please, I have all the info I need on it if I were really interested), but I do know that it is very easy to do one way, but very hard to do the other! Exactly what you need for public key crypto. Now, if we have a theoretical computer which can break this in reasonable time, DSA becomes worthless. However, there are definately other ways of doing public key crypto than the factoring problem.
Also, another interesting things about quantum crypto (of course, quantum crypto is largely theoretical at this point, so this is not guaranteed in real world implementations) is that both ends KNOW if the datastream has been intercepted. Not just if it's been modified (we can be reasonably sure of that right now using good hashing algorithms for signatures), but if it has mearly been intercepted. This is quite handy because now you know immediately if you need to somehow change things since your data is even POSSIBLY compromised. Really cool stuff.
I must reiterate, IANAC (cryptographer).
Re:Ronald Reagan did a few good things (Score:3, Insightful)
True friends don't help friends do illegal and immoral things. France is your friend.
Re:Is the NSA behind it? (Score:5, Informative)
Quantum cryptography has a cool name, but in practice, it sucks, at least its current implementations.
Ok, that's right. But it sucks not because it's flawed, but because it's too slow to communicate with yet(well, to create the key actually).
It's not end-to-end by design (you can't have a direct fiber to everyone you want to communicate with these days, after all), and so it's easily regulated.
More current implementations use 'wireless' quantum channels in open air, so it isn't restricted to fiber only. I agree that you won't have consumer implementation before at least 8-10 years, but if a big corporation or government wants to use it, they will be able to in the near future.
It's expensive.
Sure. Is there a new technology that isn't expensive? Is that incentive enough to stop developing new ideas and such? No.
It doesn't solve key management problems, and the installations that have been publicly described so far are extremely vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
WOAH! Until then it was ok, just some argumentation problems, but this is pure outright missinformation. I don't know where you read that, I'd like to know.
First, Quantum Key Distribution is there to SOLVE key management problems related to one-time pad methods. The first and foremost goal of quantum encryption is to remove the logistic problems of one-time pad. So, you are wayyy off on this one.
Second, QKD is unconditionally secure, and that includes man-in-the-middle. I doubt current implementation are "extremely vulnerable" against that attack, unless you have some proof to show, I'd be interested to know.
If I believed in conspiracy theories, I'd say that the NSA is luring the EU towards unavailable and untested quantum cryptography, and away from commercially available, tested, reliable and rather secure conventional crypto products. Actually, the quantum crypto recommendation (whether it's contained in some EU documents or not) is the result of a pretty slick PR (and lobbying) campaign.
Well, I can't argue about tin-foiled hat arguments, hehe. The problem with conventional crypto methods is that they are breakable in the absolute, and the Echelon program is certainly the one who is able to achieve this feat. QKD isn't. This is the main point in favor of QKD, especially when you want to protect yourself against Echelon.
Re:Is the NSA behind it? (Score:3, Informative)
You are entirely correct in the purpose of QKD. However,
is quite incorrect.
First off, nothing is unconditionally secure. If you believe something to be unconditionally secure, you should put your wallet back right now and cool off. And furthermore, without additional protocols in the classical channel, QKD is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. The attacker must first snag both classical and quantum channels, but then [
Re:Banning of strong encryption (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I think a more realistic scenario is government pressure on corporations to build tools with easy to use encryption that is easily cracked or government crackable (i.e. key escrow) to