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Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet for Over Two Years A quantum internet capable of sending perfectly secure messages has been running at Los Alamos National Labs for the last two and a half years, say researchers One of the dreams for security experts is the creation of a quantum internet that allows perfectly secure communication based on the powerful laws of quantum mechanics.The basic idea here is that the act of measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, always changes it. So any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs...

Historians from GCHQ are appealing for the veteran codebreakers of Bletchley Park to volunteer for one last act of service for their country: cracking the D-Day carrier pigeon cipher that has stumped Britain's finest minds. The coded message had been carefully filed in a small red capsule and attached to a carrier pigeon to be delivered 70 years ago. But instead of arriving safely at its destination, the unfortunate bird got stuck in a chimney en-route and lost. The message was found earlier this month by homeowner David Martin, who ripped out a fireplace to find the skeleton while renovating...

Remains Of World War II Military Pigeon Ignites Code Mystery Back in 1982, David Martin discovered the remains of a pigeon while renovating his chimney. Upon closer inspection he noticed that the dead bird had a red capsule attached to its leg, what has now been confirmed as a top secret message that was en route to an unknown location in Britain during World War II. Ignored for three decades, code experts are now trying to decrypt the secret message. Though rarely discussed, pigeons were widely used during the war as an old-school way to transmit messages. Among the benefits,...

Interactive proofs — mathematical games that underlie much modern cryptography — work even if players try to use quantum information to cheat.Interactive proofs, which MIT researchers helped pioneer, have emerged as one of the major research topics in theoretical computer science. In the classic interactive proof, a questioner with limited computational power tries to extract reliable information from a computationally powerful but unreliable respondent. Interactive proofs are the basis of cryptographic systems now in wide use, but for computer scientists, they’re just as important for the insight they provide into the complexity of computational problems. Twenty years ago, researchers showed...

A pair of rare Enigma machines used in the Spanish Civil War have been given to the head of GCHQ, Britain's communications intelligence agency. The machines - only recently discovered in Spain - fill in a missing chapter in the history of British code-breaking, paving the way for crucial successes in World War II. A row of senior Spanish military and intelligence officers stand upright in a line in front of a long elegant table in the country's Army Museum in Toledo. In front of them are two modest, slightly battered wooden boxes that are the subject of the day's...

Using executable program files to hide data with steganographySteganography is a form of security through obscurity in which information is hidden within an unusual medium. An artist might paint a coded message into a portrait, for instance, or an author embed words in the text. A traditional paper watermark is a well-known example of steganography in action. At first glance, there would appear to be nothing unusual about the work, but a recipient aware of the presence of the hidden message would be able to extract it easily. In the computer age, steganography has become more of a science than...

Abu Dhabi: An Emirati and former banker has created a secret code language he says is unbreakable. Mohammad Gaith Bin Mahah Al Mazroui is challenging skilled coders, hackers and cryptographers to break the encryption of his cipher. Al Mazroui said there might be only one known cipher to date that had proven to be unbreakable,. This was called the one-time pad, where every letter was transposed to another letter located a random distance away. But Al Mazroui said his cipher, which he called Abu Dhabi Code, was based on a group of symbols he said he designed himself. "Encryption takes...

A French firm has developed a cell phone cryptography technology strong enough to satisfy French government and NATO security standards. The president of France was pleased, and his subordinates were relieved, because their boss is an enthusiastic smart phone user. Smartphones are popular because they can do so much, particularly accessing the Internet. But wireless devices, especially cell phones, give military and government security officials a very bad feeling. Moreover, in the last few years, several prominent heads-of-state (including the current American president), who were avid smartphone users, came to power. They were all told by their security personnel that...

Most of us are aware that our governments monitor nearly every form of electronic communication. We are also aware of private companies doing the same. This strikes most of us as slightly troubling, but very few of us say or do much about it. There are two primary reasons for this: 1. We really don’t see how it is going to hurt us. Mass surveillance is certainly a new, odd, and perhaps an ominous thing, but we just don’t see a complete picture or a smoking gun. 2. We are constantly surrounded with messages that say, “Only crazy people complain...

In 1943 I was stationed at RAF Brize Norton, working as an electrician on Hen gist gliders among other aircraft. One morning I received a message at a dispersal point to report immediately to the Station Warrant Officer. Within hours I had cleared the Station and was on the train to participate in one of the best kept secrets of WWII. In 1943 a number of RAF electricians were interviewed for an unspecific task at an unspecific place and I was among those selected. Within a few weeks I joined a group of fellow electricians at RAF Church Green, where...

Proof-of-concept system could lead to ultra-secure international communication. Entangled photons of light could help to create ultra-secure communication systems.Punhstock Physicists have built a communication network, secured by quantum cryptography, that could one day work on a global scale. Quantum cryptography scrambles data using the laws of quantum mechanics, relying on a concept known as entanglement to ensure absolutely security. Entanglement allows two particles to be quantum-mechanically connected even when they are physically separated. Although the specific condition of either particle cannot be precisely known, taking measurements of one will instantly tell you something about the other. The trick can't be...

Give novelist and sometime art critic John Updike credit. The 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecturer tried to answer the thorny question: "What is American about American art?"

An international team of mathematicians announced in May that they had factored a 307-digit number—a record for the largest factored number and a feat that suggests Internet security may be on its last legs. “Things are becoming less and less secure,” says Arjen Lenstra, a computer scientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale (EPFL) in Switzerland, who organized the effort. Messages in cyberspace are encrypted with a random 1,024-bit number generated by multiplying two large primes together. But if hackers using factorization can break the number into its prime multipliers, they can intercept the message. Factorization currently takes too long to...

According to a warning from cryptographer Adi Shamir, the man behind the "S" in the widely used RSA encyrption algorithm, increasingly sophisticated computer chips could possibly lead to undetected bugs in calculations. This increases the risk that these bugs could be used to crack public key encryption algorithms. Not just PCs could be affected but cellphones and any other device with a computer chip could as well. The real danger is that once a vulnerability is found millions of PCs could be attacked simultaneously. This is not a new phenomenon, as other calculation bugs have been discovered, such as,...

SPYING is big business, and avoiding being spied on an even bigger one. So imagine if someone came up with a simple, cheap way of encrypting messages that is almost impossible to hack into? American computer engineer Laszlo Kish at Texas A&M University in College Station claims to have done just that. He says the thermal properties of a simple wire can be exploited to create a secure communications channel, one that outperforms quantum cryptography keys. His cipher device, which he first proposed in 2005, exploits a property called thermal noise. Thermal noise is generated by the natural agitation of...

TAIPEI—Within four years, the U.S. government will cease to use SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm) for digital signatures, and convert to a new and more advanced "hash" algorithm, according to the article "Security Cracked!" from New Scientist . The reason for this change is that associate professor Wang Xiaoyun of Beijing's Tsinghua University and Shandong University of Technology, and her associates, have already cracked SHA-1. Wang also cracked MD5 (Message Digest 5), the hash algorithm most commonly used before SHA-1 became popular. Previous attacks on MD5 required over a million years of supercomputer time, but Wang and her research team obtained...

The Enigma machine up for sale on eBay has reached €40,150, with seven hours still to go. The machine is being sold by an "eBay shop" in Munich which uses the online auction house to sell items for customers. A spokesman at the shop told us the machine had been brought in by a customer who got it from his grandfather. He said there had already been a lot of interest in the code making machine, but the seller was hoping for a price of at least €40,000. The auction ends at 8pm today. It has already attracted 47 bids....

An amateur cryptologist's internet project is using idling computers to help crack three Nazi codes that eluded the Enigma codebreakers of the Second World War. Launched in January, the project has already broken one of the three messages, from a U-Boat commander forced to dive during an attack on November 25, 1942. The computers of 2,500 strangers are now whirring away, trying to decode the remaining two. You can volunteer your computer here.Stefan Krah, a German-born cryptologist from Utrecht, in the Netherlands, started the network in January after writing a programme that combined the brute force of connected computers with...

Boffins to crack al-Qaeda Code breakers ... Bletchley Park     By GEORGE PASCOE-WATSON GORDON Brown will use the brains that won World War Two to break al-Qaeda’s secret computer codes. The Chancellor will spend millions assembling a star chamber of eggheads — a new Bletchley Park — to defeat Muslim extremists. Mr Brown will reveal in a keynote speech in London on Monday: “I have found myself immersed in measures designed to cut off sources of terrorist finance. “This requires an operation using modern methods of forensic accounting as imaginative and pathbreaking as the Enigma codebreakers at Bletchley Park.”...

RSA-640 Factored By Eric W. Weisstein November 8, 2005--A team at the German Federal Agency for Information Technology Security (BSI) recently announced the factorization of the 193-digit number 310 7418240490 0437213507 5003588856 7930037346 0228427275 4572016194 8823206440 5180815045 5634682967 1723286782 4379162728 3803341547 1073108501 9195485290 0733772482 2783525742 3864540146 9173660247 7652346609 known as RSA-640. The team responsible for this factorization is the same one that previously factored the 174-digit number known as RSA-576 (MathWorld headline news, December 5, 2003) and the 200-digit number known as RSA-200 (MathWorld headline news, May 10, 2005). RSA numbers are composite numbers having exactly two prime factors (i.e.,...