A new paper claims that a common digital security system could be tweaked to withstand attacks even from a powerful quantum computer.
A new paper claims that a common digital security system could be tweaked to withstand attacks even from a powerful quantum computer.
.. If researchers could build a quantum computer that could outperform classical supercomputers, the thinking goes, cryptographers could use a particular algorithm called Shor’s algorithm to render the RSA cryptosystem unsalvageable. The deadline to avert this may arrive sooner than we think: Google recently claimed that its quantum computers will be able to perform a calculation that’s beyond the reach of any classical computer by the end of the year.
.. The authors of the paper estimate that attacking a terabyte-size key using Shor’s algorithm would require around 2100 operations on a quantum computer, an enormous number comparable to the total number of bacterial cells on Earth.
.. The authors report that generating a terabyte-size RSA key and carrying out the encryption-decryption process takes about five days.
The Dangerous All Writs Act Precedent in the Apple Encryption Case
Judge Sheri Pym, a California district-court magistrate, has ordered Apple to come up with a new software bundle that can be loaded onto the phone and, in effect, take over the operating system and tell it to let the F.B.I. in. (Apple will have a chance to object to the order in court.) As an added point of convenience, this bundle is also supposed to let the agents enter passcodes electronically, rather than tapping them in, which is one of the many points on which the government seems to have moved from asking for compliance with a subpoena to demanding full-scale customer service.
.. If it can tell Apple, which has been accused of no wrongdoing, to sit down and write a custom operating system for it, what else could it do?
.. (The N.S.A. used, or rather promiscuously misused, another pen-register case from the same era to justify its bulk data collection.) It no longer becomes fanciful to wonder about what the F.B.I. might, for example, ask coders adept in whatever genetic-editing language emerges from the recent developments in CRISPR technology to do.
.. Could it require someone with distinct cultural or linguistic knowledge not only to give it information but to use that expertise to devise ways for it to infiltrate that community? Could an imam, for example, be asked not only to tell what he knows but to manufacture an informant?