Your secrets are safe with quasar encryption

Adam Back adam at cypherspace.org
Thu Mar 30 02:22:58 EST 2006


How many suitable quasars are there?  You'd be damn lucky if its a
cryptograhic strength number.

Now you might think there are limits to how many signals you can
listen to and that would be some protection, however you still have
brute force guess a signal, and probability of guessing the right key
would be rather high compared to eg 2^-256 per guess with AES.

Also they offer the strange comment "The method does not require a
large radio antenna or that the communicating parties be located in
the same hemisphere, as radio signals can be broadcast over the
internet at high speed."  So if we are talking only about enough
signals such that they can be continuosly monitored or a trusted
server which monitors your subset for you... well then how do you
secure the stream (ie if you send it over the internet AES encrypted,
you'd just as well AES encrypt your data).

Sounds more than a bit dubious overall.

Adam

On Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 06:20:33PM -0800, Sean McGrath wrote:
> http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn8913&print=true
> 
> Your secrets are safe with quasar encryption
> 
>     * 16:00 29 March 2006
>     * NewScientist.com news service
>     * Will Knight
> 
> Intergalactic radio signals from quasars could emerge as an exotic but 
> effective new tool for securing terrestrial communications against 
> eavesdropping.

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