Posted on 05/03/2005 1:26:18 PM PDT by marshmallow
SYDNEY - Australian scientists believe they have developed an unbreakable information code to stop hackers, using a diamond, a kitchen microwave oven and an optical fibre.
Researchers at Melbourne University used the microwave to "fuse" a tiny diamond, just 1/1000th of a millimetre, onto an optical fibre, which could be used to create a single photon beam of light which they say cannot be hacked.
Photons are the smallest known particles of light. Until now, scientists could not produce a single-photon beam, thereby narrowing down the stream of light used to transmit information.
"When it comes to cryptology, it's not so much of a problem to have a coded message intercepted, the problem is getting the key (to decode it)," said university research fellow James Rabeau, who developed the diamond device.
"The single-photon beam makes for an unstealable key."
The security of information depends on the properties of light that is used to transmit data.
Laser beams which are used at the moment send billions of photons, making it easy for hackers to steal some of them and break the code, said Rabeau.
The diamond device sends a stream of single photons, so that if the chain of communication is broken, the information becomes corrupted and a hacker immediately exposed to both the sender and the receiver, he said.
Only diamonds are known to create single-photon beams.
Rabeau and his team have received a $US2.5 million ($NZ3.46 million) innovation grant from the Victoria state government to develop a prototype and commercialise the technology.
Oh what the heck, try it anyway.
Anything that can be produced once can be produced a second time.
Having said that, if I have to buy diamonds and some sort of a proton beam receiver just so I can bank online, well, I'll just walk down to the branch.
Pimple faced nerds the World over will have yet another reason go go dateless as they spend a few nights figuring out a quick hack.
go go = to go
[sigh]
I simply hate to see this kind of hyperbole. What the author should have said was not that the encryption is "unbreakable" but rather should have stated that any interception of the stream was detectable. In essence, the end points would know when someone is listening.
However, this only addresses the interception component of a transmission and only that portion of the transmission via fiber optic cable. There are a WHOLE bunch of other interception points between the end points.
'Unbreakable', eh?
Could we call the code Titanic?
This 'cannot be hacked is based on the 'Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal'.
It is physically (as in violating a law of physics) impossible to interfere with a single beam of photons without changing it and thus alerting the people at each end that you have intercepted it. They can then stop transmitting.
So9
Or pimple-faced nerds might be able to finally provide a single, secure cryptography stream for the Marines to unify their communications rat's nest.
Um...nothing described in this article is an "unbreakable code".
What they are actually discussing is an non-interceptable transmission system.
It couldn't be reproduced if each individual diamond carries a signature of some sort. In other words, the reciever would know the information stream was coming from some source other than the original source.
The article doesn't specify if this is the case, however.
And how are they going to deal with the light absorbtion in the optical fiber line? While small, it is non-zero. When you have a multiphoton stream, you could lose some, and still be left with something useable. But if you have a single photon and it gets absorbed somewhere along the way... they need an absolutely lossless line.
My encryption algorithm will be better than this.
so its hackable, just not undetecably hackable.
My thoughts exactly.
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