Quantum Crypto

[John Lowry]

Perry is absolutely right.
There is no point in pursuing this.
It might even be analogous to what we now know about computers.
We were warned that there would never be a need for more than
A half-dozen - after all, they were extremely expensive just to get
A few more digits in the logarithm table ...  Thank goodness that we stopped
those wasteful government research efforts and put money into improving
analog mechanical desktop calculators - which is all anyone ever needed
anyway.  ;-)

Perry,
    I seem to remember paying excessive amounts for my first installations
of 1822, X.25, token-ring, ethernet - in fact all new devices.  Even the
ones that weren't needed ... Initial cost is a poor metric and you of all
people should know it.  However, I sincerely applaud your effort to present
a snapshot of the state of the art - and the effort to qualify the QKD folks
who are prematurely entering the market.  Please try to include a view the
long term potential and imagine how it might be used when you write your
report.  After all, who would have thought that computers _would_ be linked
together to create communication networks ... And that my 75-year old mother
could not only afford one but actually enjoy using it.  (Ok, its a Macintosh
...)
Please don't dismiss what is really a very new research area with unknown
potential - just leaving the physicist's lab bench for the engineering lab
bench - because a few folks are entering the market too soon and claiming
that they have "product".  There is a baby in that bath water !

Season's Greetings !

John


On 12/16/03 10:14, "Perry E.Metzger" <perry at piermont.com> wrote:

> 
> There have been more press releases about quantum crypto products
> lately.
> 
> I will summarize my opinion simply -- even if they can do what is
> advertised, they aren't very useful. They only provide link security,
> and at extremely high cost. You can easily just run AES+HMAC on all
> the bits crossing a line and get what is for all practical purposes
> similar security, at a fraction of the price.
> 
> The problem in security is not that we don't have crypto technologies
> that are good enough -- our algorithms are fine. Our real problem is
> in much more practical things like getting our software to high enough
> assurance levels, architectural flaws in our systems, etc.
> 
> Thus, Quantum Crypto ends up being a very high priced way to solve
> problems that we don't have.
> 
> 
> Perry
> 
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