Monthly Archives: March 2014

Google Expands Search Encryption to China, Elsewhere

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Google is now "routinely encrypting" Web searches made by users in China as it goes global with SSL encryption in the wake of spying and privacy scandals.

Google is now "routinely encrypting" Web searches made by users in China, an expansion of search encryption practices the company has been conducting on a limited basis for several years, according to reports.

The move is not specifically aimed at China, which is known to censor the Internet and track the online activity of its citizens, but "rather part of a global expansion of privacy technology designed to thwart surveillance by government intelligence agencies, police and hackers," Google told The Washington Post.

In fact, the Internet giant began encrypting searches conducted by logged-in Google users in late 2011. Last September, in the wake of the NSA spying revelations made by Edward Snowden, Google stepped up its Searching over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) parameters to cover basically all users of the site, logged in or not, Search Engine Land noted at the time.

Universal or not, as the Post noted, the current expansion of SSL-encrypted search by Google is likely to be an unwelcome development for the Chinese government and officials in other countries which routinely monitor Internet use.

"China's Great Firewall, as its censorship system is known, has long intercepted searches for information it deemed politically sensitive," the Post said. Chinese officials looking for search terms like "Dalai Lama" or "Tiananmen Square" could now be staring at "indecipherable strings of numbers and letters" when examining Google searches.

Thanks to expanded SSL encryption, the governments of countries like China and Saudi Arabia may have a tougher time keeping track of potential dissidents via their Internet browsing. But they still have a powerful arrow in their quiversimply blocking Google from the Internet within their borders, the Post noted.

Meanwhile, in another bit of privacy news, Twitter this week apologized for a bug that exposed nearly 100,000 private accounts to non-approved followers. The microblogging site said it had fixed a glitch that "under rare circumstances, allowed non-approved followers to receive protected tweets via SMS or push notifications since November 2013."

The Twitter SMS bug affected 93,788 protected accounts, the company said in a blog post.

"As part of the bug fix, we've removed all of these unapproved follows, and taken steps to protect against this kind of bug in the future," Twitter's Bob Lord said. "While the scope of this bug was small in terms of affected users, that does not change the fact that this should not have happened. We've emailed each of these affected users to let them know about this bug and extend our whole-hearted apologies."

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Google Expands Search Encryption to China, Elsewhere

New Cryptography Scheme Secured By Quantum Physics

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Image Caption: The experiment's Alice and Bob communicated with entangled photons produced in this setup. Such apparatus could be miniaturized using techniques from integrated optics. Credit: IQC, University of Waterloo

Centre for Quantum Technologies

The way we secure digital transactions could soon change. An international team has demonstrated a form of quantum cryptography that can protect people doing business with others they may not know or trust a situation encountered often on the internet and in everyday life, for example at a banks ATM.

Having quantum cryptography to hand is a realistic prospect, I think. I expect that quantum technologies will gradually become integrated with existing devices such as smartphones, allowing us to do things like identify ourselves securely or generate encryption keys, says Stephanie Wehner, a Principal Investigator at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore, and co-author on the paper.

In cryptography, the problem of providing a secure way for two mutually distrustful parties to interact is known as two-party secure computation. The new work, published in Nature Communications, describes the implementation using quantum technology of an important building block for such schemes.

CQT theorists Wehner and Nelly Ng teamed up with researchers at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo, Canada, for the demonstration.

Research partnerships such as this one between IQC and CQT are critical in moving the field forward, says Raymond Laflamme, Executive Director at the Institute for Quantum Computing. The infrastructure that weve built here at IQC is enabling exciting progress on quantum technologies.

CQT and IQC are two of the worlds largest, leading research centres in quantum technologies. Great things can happen when we combine our powers, says Artur Ekert, Director of CQT.

The experiments performed at IQC deployed quantum-entangled photons in such a way that one party, dubbed Alice, could share information with a second party, dubbed Bob, while meeting stringent restrictions. Specifically, Alice has two sets of information. Bob requests access to one or the other, and Alice must be able to send it to him without knowing which set hes asked for. Bob must also learn nothing about the unrequested set. This is a protocol known as 1-2 random oblivious transfer (ROT).

ROT is a starting point for more complicated schemes that have applications, for example, in secure identification. Oblivious transfer is a basic building block that you can stack together, like lego, to make something more fantastic, says Wehner.

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New Cryptography Scheme Secured By Quantum Physics

More secure communications thanks to quantum physics

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One of the recent revelations by Edward Snowden is that the U.S. National Security Agency is currently developing a quantum computer. Physicists aren't surprised by this news; such a computer could crack the encryption that is commonly used today in no time and would therefore be highly attractive for the NSA.

Professor Thomas Walther of the Institute of Applied Physics at the Technical University of Darmstadt is convinced that "Sooner or later, the quantum computer will arrive." Yet the quantum physicist is not worried. After all, he knows of an antidote: so-called quantum cryptography. This also uses the bizarre rules of quantum physics, but not to decrypt messages at a record pace. Quite the opposite -- to encrypt it in a way that can not be cracked by a quantum computer. To do this, a "key" that depends on the laws of quantum mechanics has to be exchanged between the communication partners; this then serves to encrypt the message. Physicists throughout the world are perfecting quantum cryptography to make it suitable for particularly security-sensitive applications, such as for banking transactions or tap-proof communications. Walther's Ph.D. student Sabine Euler is one of them.

As early as the 1980s, physicists Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard thought about how quantum physics could help transfer keys while avoiding eavesdropping. Something similar to Morse code is used, consisting of a sequence of light signals from individual light particles (photons). The information is in the different polarizations of successive photons. Eavesdropping is impossible due to the quantum nature of photons. Any eavesdropper will inevitably be discovered because the eavesdropper needs to do measurements on the photons, and these measurements will always be noticed.

"That's the theory" says Walther. However, there are ways to listen without being noticed in practice. This has been demonstrated by hackers who specialize in quantum cryptography based on systems already available on the market. "Commercial systems have always relinquished a little bit of security in the past," says Walther. In order to make the protocol of Bennett and Brassard reality, you need, for example, light sources that are can be controlled so finely that they emit single photons in succession. Usually, a laser that is weakened so much that it emits single photons serves as the light source. "But sometimes two photons can come out simultaneously, which might help a potential eavesdropper to remain unnoticed" says Walther. The eavesdropper could intercept the second photon and transmit the first one.

Therefore, the team led by Sabine Euler uses a light source that transmits a signal when it sends a single photon; this signal can be used to select only the individually transmitted photons for communication. Nevertheless, there are still vulnerabilities. If the system changes the polarization of the light particles during coding, for example, the power consumption varies or the time interval of the pulses changes slightly. "An eavesdropper could tap this information and read the message without the sender and receiver noticing" explains Walther. Sabine Euler and her colleagues at the Institute of Applied Physics are trying to eliminate these vulnerabilities. "They are demonstrating a lot of creativity here" says Walther approvingly. Thanks to such research, it will be harder and harder for hackers to take advantage of vulnerabilities in quantum cryptography systems.

The TU Darmstadt quantum physicists want to make quantum cryptography not only more secure, but more manageable at the same time. "In a network in which many users wish to communicate securely with each other, the technology must be affordable," he says. Therefore, his team develops its systems in such a manner that they are as simple as possible and can be miniaturized.

The research team is part of the Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt (CASED), in which the TU Darmstadt, the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology and the University of Darmstadt combine their expertise in current and future IT security issues. Over 200 scientists conduct research in CASED, funded by the State Initiative for Economic and Academic Excellence (LOEWE) of the Hessian Ministry for Science and the Arts. "We also exchange information with computer scientists, which is very exciting," says Walther.

After all, the computer science experts deal with many of the same issues as Walther's quantum physicists. For example, Johannes Buchmann of the department of Computer Science at the TU Darmstadt is also working on encryption methods that theoretically can not be cracked by a quantum computer. However, these are not based on quantum physics phenomena, but rather on an unsolvable math problem.

Therefore, it may well be that the answer to the first code-cracking quantum computer comes from Darmstadt.

Bizarre quantum physics and encryption

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More secure communications thanks to quantum physics

Malignant computation

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Cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, could revolutionize money to the same degree that the Internet has revolutionized communication. However, like any economic marketplace, human exuberance is the greatest threat to the cryptocurrency phenomenon. Markets fail to the degree that the market can be dominated by those seeking personal gain, and markets succeed to the degree that they resist domination and focus on benefiting society at large.

The cryptocurrency market place is in danger of becoming so focused on profitability, that it loses sight of the potential computational benefits that it could provide to society. I hope that this article will influence designers of cryptocurrencies to attempt to avoid computational malignancy.

Many people regard the success or failure of the market to be the degree that it works for them, rather than for society as a whole. One of the fundamental motivations for cryptocurrency is the general sense that banks, governments and markets have failed to protect the interest of the common man. It is not an accident that the rise of bitcoin began shortly after the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

Cells, typically, prefer to serve the whole organism, but when they get confused and start to multiply without regard for the impact on the organism as a whole, they can morph into a series of diseases that we refer to collectively as cancer. This is why curing cancer is so hard. Cancer is not a disease, but a family of diseases that share a common core problem: cells acting in their own interests that betray the body as a collective.

We have a similar problem with the use of computation in markets. We can call this malignant computation. This is when computation starts to ensure its own survival at the expense of the overall marketplace. The Skynet hypothesis is a boogeyman intended to scare the young and the paranoid. The real threat from AI is that it will become so good at the pointless tasks that we have given it that those pointless tasks will become a black hole of resources.

This has already happened with high-frequency trading on Wall Street. There is an ongoing arms race between computers that trade stocks to see which one can get the edge over the other, and entire series of engineering feats that have no purpose whatsoever other than to overcome previous engineering feats. In several respects, the computational trading platforms are the most advanced computation systems on the planet, and they are engaged in a micro-second game of mutual navel gazing.There is so much money being made by these super computers that the only thing that is absolutely certain is that further funding for bigger super computers will become available.

Capital markets serve a function in society. They ensure that businesses that provide value to society will have access to large amounts of capital to invest in otherwise too expensive projects. I have not been able to think of a single way in which the high-frequency trading platforms have improved the markets capacity to serve that function. No one has been able to provide me with any contrary insight, although several pointed me to more eloquent statements of the underlying problem. High-frequency trading is the first and foremost example of malignant computing, but it is not the last.

Malignant computing is a problem in cryptocurrencies too, but in order to discuss it clearly, one has to understand how the computational arms race in cryptocurrency mining works. This article does a wonderful job of summarizing the issues of the crypto arms race.

Cryptocurrencies in the bitcoin mold rely on a process called mining, which is the process of performing arbitrary calculations that help to ensure that the currency as a whole is functional and secure. Because of the inflated prices of bitcoins, mining has been very profitable, and as a result, we have seen the entire computational infrastructure of bitcoin switch to ASICS, or Application Specific Integrated Circuits. When you see the word ASIC, you should have a mental shortcut to single purpose computing. The bitcoin mining ASICs are so specific that they can only be used for the computations for bitcoin mining; they cannot even perform nearly identical computations for different parts of the bitcoin computation process.

I believe that this is another example of malignant computing. Bitcoin mining will continue until 2033. For bitcoin, ASICs will do the vast majority of this work, and assuming the value of a single bitcoin continues to rise, the amount of money invested in specialized hardware to perform bitcoin mining will almost certainly pass into the tens of billions of dollars. The bitcoin mining algorithms rewards miners relative to the whole amount of computational power devoted to bitcoin mining everywhere. If computational power were equated to lottery tickets, this would be tantamount to massive changes to your chance of winning.

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Malignant computation