ImperialViolet

Ok, I've improved the IV generating scripts to break up blog entries into 10 on the front page and a series of archive pages (20 entries each). You can access the archives from links at the bottom of every page.

I went to a talk by Simon Singh (author of The Code Book) on Wednesday (part of the Cheltenham Science Festival). It was a crypto talk (nothing I didn't know already really, but very well done and with a real live demo of an Enigma) during which he went through the solutions some of the 10 challenges he sets at the end of The Code Book. Nothing remarkable here except that he admitted that the toughest code to crack (RSA wrapping 3DES) was done wrong. Rather than Enc1Dec2Enc1 he did Enc1Dec1Enc2 - which is just the same as single DES. Implimentation issues again.

But the part that got me thinking was a little aside when he said that Quantum computers might cripple factoring schemes, but that's ok because we have Quantum crypto. Now I need to go lookup exactly what algorithms exist for QCs - but if we assume that it breaks all pubkey systems we know then Quantum crypto doesn't replace current crypto at all. It requires a direct fibre link in order to preserve the all important quantum states of the photons. This puts us back to the days where very few people have crypto (those who can afford direct fibre links between themselves) - a major step back.

It would be a sorry state is this happened - someone please reassure me that it wont.