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Quantum hacking

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Mon, 2010-08-30 06:38

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Quantum hacking

Here is an interesting story: Hackers blind quantum cryptographers http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100829/full/news.2010.436.html Basically, they found a really simple way to do a man-in-the-middle attack on a quantum encrypted link. You just intercept the photons and the "blind" the recipient by shining photons at him, so that he does not interfere with your decoding. Then you send a copy to the recipient using the blinding photons. No doubt this will be patchable, but it suggests that quantum encryption in EP may have some potential for hacking despite its fundamental security. After all, the real security of a system is equal to the security of the weakest link, and the EP systems are very, very complex.

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Mon, 2010-08-30 13:33

Dry Observer Dry Observer's picture

Re: Quantum hacking

I tend to assume that only point-to-point transmissions (through quantum entanglement) are relatively secure against a sufficiently powerful and curious intruder. In other words, either the TITANs or the Prometheans could be reading your most secret and heavily protected emails. If you have secrets, make sure they aren't traveling by way of electromagnetic wavelengths. Of course, if a TITAN were sufficiently interested, they'd just find you and hack your brain. But you don't want your information swept in a casual data mining gesture by some broken, outdated TITAN delta fork sitting in an asteroid somewhere, still faithfully collecting intel and designing R'lyeh for its maker. Incidentally, basic quantum computing, data mining, evolutionary algorithms, rudimentary AI and more advanced AI/AGI/seed AI are some of the reasons why I think a sane, motivated transhuman civilization might not be totally hapless in the face of an insane, low-grade Singularity like the TITANs. Even at the level of their biotech contributors, there's quite a bit you can do once you get past some of the basic constraints of having to do almost everything with your biological brain and with your own hands, voice and eyes. "Mere" basic mesh inserts and muses open up immense possibilities for integrating with incredibly advanced initiatives using the above tech -- initiatives you can direct from an oversight level with a high degree of comprehension and even personal contribution. And [i]that's[/i] what a relatively ordinary researcher could accomplish, while still trapped in a relatively unaugmented morph and brain.

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Mon, 2010-08-30 14:14

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Quantum hacking

Yes, there are ways you can send messages past even TITANs and they have no real way of decoding them. One time pads is another one. Unfortunately, as the above attack (and the previous paper) shows, bad implementations can allow eavesdroppers to listen in. The danger might be on the protocol and hardware level rather than the basic encryption or quantum processing. Not to mention social engineering tricks (which can get rather intriguing if you have async powers). I think it is true that transhumanity has a fighting chance, at least against the TITANs. Bigger threats might be different, but a dispersed, diverse and inventive civilization is in itself a pretty powerful superintelligence.

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Sun, 2011-06-19 23:55

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Quantum hacking

Now an actual implementation of the hack has been presented: http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.0105 http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v2/n6/full/ncomms1348.html

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Wed, 2013-09-04 14:53

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Good news! Looks like quantum

Good news! Looks like quantum communications are safe again: http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2013/08/quantum-cryptography-safe-again http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/02/your_secrets_are_safe_with_quant... http://phys.org/news/2013-09-approach-quantum-based.html In fact, a Nature paper this week showed that you can share quantum secure communications: http://qz.com/121143/toshiba-has-invented-a-quantum-cryptography-network... http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v501/n7465/full/501037a.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v501/n7465/full/nature12493.html This system uses clients sending their quantum signals to a trusted hub, which does the tricky single photon detection. This makes things cheaper, and allows distributing undetectable keys to everybody. Now they can all talk to the hub safely, and the hub can give them randomly generated keys to each other. Obvious EP mission: infiltrate the high security and tamperproofing of a quantum encryption hub. (QE comms are different, of course - they do not send any particles anywhere. But it makes sense to store the "home" side of qubits in a central repository that can receive communications and route them straight to another QE link.)

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Wed, 2013-09-04 17:02

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Device: QE Switchboard

Device: QE Switchboard QE switches allow several QE comms units to talk to each other. One side of the qubit pairs are loaded into the switch, the other in the QE reservoir. Signals to and from the QE communicator can be sent through the switchboard, including from other QE comm systems. While mostly known among gatecrashers, the big uses are finance (FTL communication is the ultimate high speed trading) and military (not just secure intel, but even more importantly FTL targeting of weaponry in space warfare). An ordinary QE switchboard is just a fast router linked to QE equipment, but serious applications use a quantum computer for security: all its internal processing is done using quantum superposed states that will collapse if there is any outside interference. This makes them effectively tamper-proof, especially since the code running on them has been carefully vetted and proven secure before being flashed into hardware: there is nothing to hack, and eavesdropping scrambles communications (either just during the eavesdropping, or permanently decohering the reservoir qubits for truly paranoid security settings). Cost: Expensive+ (Meanwhile the mere quantum switchboard is an everyday High cost module used in most habitat comms systems. It ensures that linked devices and channels get their proper quantum-guaranteed keys. While often built securely and with heavy tamper-proofing the normal models are unremarkable. Some places, like egobanks or intelligence agencies, do care more deeply on preventing quantum hacking.)

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Fri, 2013-09-06 03:20

Smokeskin

Arenamontanus wrote:

Arenamontanus wrote:
In fact, a Nature paper this week showed that you can share quantum secure communications: http://qz.com/121143/toshiba-has-invented-a-quantum-cryptography-network... http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v501/n7465/full/501037a.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v501/n7465/full/nature12493.html This system uses clients sending their quantum signals to a trusted hub, which does the tricky single photon detection. This makes things cheaper, and allows distributing undetectable keys to everybody. Now they can all talk to the hub safely, and the hub can give them randomly generated keys to each other. Obvious EP mission: infiltrate the high security and tamperproofing of a quantum encryption hub. (QE comms are different, of course - they do not send any particles anywhere. But it makes sense to store the "home" side of qubits in a central repository that can receive communications and route them straight to another QE link.)

I once made a Shadowrun adventure with the same setup, just with a corp selling physical, sealed one-time pad chips and then running a comms hub using them. I actually couldn't see why such a setup wouldn't become commonplace with the total lack of hard encryption in SR, and had several arguments with people on Dumpshock iirc. Of course, OTP encryption break much of SR hacking, and this would do it even for parties that couldn't directly exchange OTPs. I came up with a "fix" of a class of sprites that were attracted to random data and corrupted the data, but tbh it is easier if you just apply some suspension of disbelief and ignore OTPs altogether.