On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 12:37 PM, Nico Williams <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 3:49 PM, Sven Moritz Hallberg <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:39:44 -0500, Warren Kumari <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Surely I am missing something here? Or is that really the news? >> >> I thought the same thing and skimmed (very incompletely) through the >> paper. They do talk about how to hide the saved bits in later sessions >> of particular QKD protocols, so maybe there is something inherent there >> that would make such an attack, say, especially hard to detect in the >> QKD setting? > > Well, if there were covert, deniable, quantum side-channels in QKD > that the vendor could exploit practically undetectably, then yes, QKD > would suddenly become not just snake oil but poisonous snake oil. > OTOH, if this is just a worry that QKD devices might be compromised > (whether purposefully by the vendor or unwittingly), then this is > nothing new, and QKD remains snake oil.
I think it's important to note that it's obviously completely wrong to say "QKD is snake-oil", what you *can* say is that someone *selling* *any* demonstratably-insecure crypto device as a secure one, is snake oil. So, that is to say, you can only claim snake-oil in reference to a vendor and a device, not a field of research. > Quantum authentication that > scales (as opposed to requiring pair-wise physical exchange of > entangled particle pairs) would be a neat trick -perhaps applying > Needham-Schoeder?- but it'd still be a novelty/curiosity IMO. > > The idea that QKD is in use by the military gives me pause, unless > it's either completely redundant and classical crypto is still used > (wasteful, yes, but that's a lesser concern), or the military using > QKD is an enemy of the cause of liberty (in which case never mind and > keep at it boys!). > > Nico > -- -- Noon Silk Fancy a quantum lunch? https://sites.google.com/site/quantumlunch/ "Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy — the joy of being this signature." _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
