Tales from the bits

InformationWeek Up until recently quantum cryptography thought to be secure to transmit cryptographic keys. Any attempt to eavesdrop the transmission could be easily detected (based on Heisenberg uncertainty principle).  This was proved wrong by the team of researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and the Max Planck [...]

BitLocker andTrueCryptare data encryption software packages. The question is which one to use and why? BitLocker comes with Windows 7 Ultimate edition. TrueCrypt is free open source software. Michael Pietroforte at 4SYSOPS has two very interesting articles. In the first article he comparesTrueCrypt 5 vs. Bitlocker. There are no significant speed differences between the two programs.  The [...]

Ellinor Millshas an interesting interview with German security expert Karsten Nohl, who showed at the Chaos Communication Congress how easy is to eavesdrop GSM calls. Nohl says that GSM’s A5/1 encryption function uses a 64-bit key that is too short to withstand the computing power available today. When the algorithm was designed 20 years ago [...]

Quantum cryptography was thought to be much more secure than all classical cryptography schemes. This extremely interesting presentation shows a successful attack of an existing quantum key distribution system exploiting a photon detector vulnerability which is probably present in all existing devices. Without Alice and Bob losing their faith in their secure communication, the group [...]

(Source: PhysOrg.com) A team from Austria’s Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) managed to send entangled photons 144 kilometres (90 miles) between the Spanish islands of Las Palmas and the Balearics using satellites Quantum cryptography is possible over a modern glass fibre net, but because of the high rate of transmission loss, this [...]