Aussie Scientists Create Unbreakable Diamond Code

New Zealand Herald ^ | 5/4/05

[Deaf Smith]

*Kids, don't put your Mom's diamond ring in the microwave to see if you can make a diamond thread.

Oh what the heck, try it anyway.

[Fido969]

Kind of a SchrÖdinger's cat thing, I guess. Once you look at it it changes. Darned if I can see the practical application, though.

Oh, well, another round of Foster's, mate!

[AbeKrieger]

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.

[MarineBrat]

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.

[MarineBrat]

go go = to go

[taxcontrol]

[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.

[Constitution Day]

'Unbreakable', eh?

Could we call the code Titanic?

[RushCrush]

This guy already did it with some chewing gum and a pencil.

[Servant of the 9]

I always find it very funny when "they" say this "which they say cannot be hacked"

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

[monkeybrau]

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.

[Psycho_Bunny]

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.

Um...nothing described in this article is an "unbreakable code".

What they are actually discussing is an non-interceptable transmission system.

[linear]

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.

[taxcontrol]

What you just described was interception, not encryption. Not the same thing. Yes an interception would be detectable but even if the end points continued to transmit, the stream would still be protected by the encryption which is an entirely different function.

[GSlob]

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.

[rdb3]

Interesting development. There may not be a need to steal anything if someone other than the intended recipient gets the key to decode.

My encryption algorithm will be better than this.

[RolandBurnam]

so its hackable, just not undetecably hackable.

[ChuckShick]

"I betcha they couldn't build a golf cart or a telephone out of bamboo sticks like I could"

[Finger Monkey]

My thoughts exactly.