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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.,...

For 15 years, a sculpture known as Kryptos has stood in a courtyard inside the heavily guarded Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Its coded message, made up of thousands of letters on a copper scroll, has stumped code breakers for 15 years. And although it's been seven years since anyone has made any progress cracking it, there's been an explosion of renewed interest in Kryptos since writer Dan Brown hid references to it on the jacket of The Da Vinci Code -- one of the hottest books in North America. And that has made life interesting for Kryptos'...

It is one of the world's most baffling puzzles, the bane of professional cryptologists and amateur sleuths who have spent 15 years trying to solve it. But the race to find the secrets of Kryptos, a sculpture inside a courtyard at the CIA's heavily guarded headquarters in Langley, Virginia, may be reaching a climax. And interest has soared since Dan Brown hid references to Kryptos on the cover design for his bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, and suggested it might play a role in his next novel, The Solomon Key. The Kryptos sculpture incorporates a coded message made up...

February 15, 2005 SHA-1 Broken SHA-1 has been broken. Not a reduced-round version. Not a simplified version. The real thing. The research team of Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo Yu (mostly from Shandong University in China) have been quietly circulating a paper describing their results: collisions in the the full SHA-1 in 2**69 hash operations, much less than the brute-force attack of 2**80 operations based on the hash length. collisions in SHA-0 in 2**39 operations. collisions in 58-round SHA-1 in 2**33 operations. This attack builds on previous attacks on SHA-0 and SHA-1, and is a major, major cryptanalytic...

The Bush administration is considering making the National Security Agency _ famous for eavesdropping and code breaking _ its "traffic cop" for ambitious plans to share homeland security information across government computer networks, a senior NSA official says. Such a decision would expand NSA's responsibility to help defend the complex network of data pipelines carrying warnings and other sensitive information. It would also require significantly more money for the ultra-secret spy agency. The NSA's director for information assurance, Daniel G. Wolf, was expected to outline his agency's potential role during a speech Wednesday at the RSA technology conference in...

Twisting The Light Away New Scientist vol 182 issue 2451 12 June 2004, page 36 A novel trick with light has got physicists in a spin. Pitch your photon like a corkscrewing curveball and you can push bandwidth through the roof, flummox eavesdroppers and perhaps even talk to aliens. Stephen Battersby investigates IT DOESN'T look like much, just a plain box about half a metre long. Nonetheless, this is the prototype of something with seemingly magical properties. Fire a beam of its laser light at the dust sitting on your tabletop and the dust motes will begin to dance around...

  Tracking Terror In Tangled WebLONDON, Aug. 17, 2004  (Photo: CBS/AP) Using proxy servers continents away, terrorists can graft their sites anywhere. Accused terrorist Abu Hamza al Masri was caught in an Internet sting.  (Photo: CBS) (CBS) If the pen is mightier than the sword, the keyboard has become the new weapon in the war of terror, promoting it and fighting it. As CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips reports, sometimes, the intent is simply propaganda. Sometimes, deeper in the net, hidden within other sites, is something more sinister: sites advocating violence, perhaps even providing instructions and commands. One site, which...

An Irish graduate student has uncovered words blacked-out of declassified US military documents using nothing more than a dictionary and text analysis software.Claire Whelan, a computer science student at Dublin City University was given the problems by her PhD supervisor as a diversion. David Naccache, a cryptographer with Gemplus, challenged her to discover the words missing from two documents: one was a memo to George Bush, and another concerned military modifications to civilian helicopters.The process is quite straightforward, and according to Naccache, Whelan's success proves that merely blotting words out of declassified documents will not keep the contents secret.The first...

The National Interest Issue Date: Winter 2003/04, Posted On: 12/12/2003 Networking Nation-States James C. Bennett The early 20th century was filled with predictions that the airplane, the automobile or the assembly line had made parliamentary democracy, market economies, jury trials and bills of rights irrelevant, obsolete and harmful. Today's scientific-technological revolutions (epitomized by space shuttles and the Internet) make the technologies of the early 20th century-its fabric-winged biplanes, Tin Lizzies and "Modern Times" gearwheel factories-look like quaint relics. Yet all of the "obsolete" institutions derided by the modernists of that day thrive and strengthen. The true surprise of the scientific revolutions ahead is...

The Evolution of a Cryptographer - CSO Magazine - September 2003 Bruce Schneier has more opinions than CSO has space to print them. To read his thoughts on cyberterrorism, national ID cards and secrecy, go to Print Links. Bruce Schneier, who literally wrote the book on cryptography, talks with Senior Editor Scott Berinato about his holistic view of security, both physical and technical. For a while, it seemed as if Bruce Schneier himself was encrypted. No one could decipher his whereabouts for an interview with CSO. This was unusual because Schneier, founder and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security, is usually...

Quantum cryptography—hailed by theoreticians as the ultimate of uncrackable codes—is finally going commercial IN THE 1992 film “Sneakers”, the ostensible research topic of one of the main characters was something called “setec astronomy”. This was an anagram of the words “too many secrets”. The research was supposed to be about developing a method for decoding all existing encryption codes. Well, if that were ever the case, it certainly isn't any more—thanks to a start-up in Somerville, Massachusetts, called MagiQ. MagiQ is in the final stages of testing a system for quantum cryptography, which it plans to release commercially within the...