Scientists have questioned the security of quantum cryptography

January 31st, 2012 | Posted by synt4x in Security

Free Business and Tech Magazines and eBooks

According to the experts, the attackers can mask their attack under natural disturbance.

A group of Canadian and British scientists questioned the nascent push to develop device-independent standards for quantum cryptography. According to their report, these technologies can be destroyed by developers of malicious software.

The analytical work of specialists “Prisoners of their own devices : Trojan attack on a hardware-independent quantum cryptography, “was published on the site arXiv.org.

This document describes a scenario that, according to scientists who have been invisible to the user and at the same time, would allow an attacker to obtain sufficient information for monitoring, “not to crack the” quantum cryptography.

From the report, authored by a mathematician at the University of London, Jonathan Barrett (Jonathan Barrett), a physicist at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Physics Kolbek Roger (Roger Colbeck), and Adrian Kent (Adrian Kent) from Cambridge Centre for Quantum Information should be: “The developer of malware software that wants to steal the data of the target user may employ any device with memory (Ed. – devices designed specifically for the attack) and to program it. ”

It should be noted that the exceptional security of quantum cryptography is that when you try to catch the output signal is constantly distorted (eg, noise of a quantum channel) and the attacker can not hide the traces of the attack. However, according to scientists, in real noise will be present constantly, regardless of whether or not the attack channel. Thus, an attacker could create a system that does not exceed a certain level of noise and conceal their activities under the natural noise.

However, scientists have pointed out that existing at present, virus writers and distributors of malicious software can not compete with the technology.

More information about the report is here. Materials that are referenced by specialists can be found at:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.6052

http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.6054

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.6056.pdf