Darpa Is Searching For The Ultimate Unbreakable Code

Photo: IBM researcher Craig Gentry

DARPA Will Spend $20 Million To Search For Crypto’s Holy Grail -- Forbes

Two years ago, IBM researcher Craig Gentry revealed that he’d cracked a 30-year old theoretical problem in cryptography: How to perform complex computations on encrypted data without decrypting it. That seemingly magical trick would allow a computer to manipulate a user’s scrambled information without ever violating its secrecy, a potential privacy breakthrough that’s particularly enticing in an era of outsourcing and cloud computing.

Turning Gentry’s innovative but impractical crypto scheme into a workable product, on the other hand, will take years’–or even decades’–more work. But to the defense and intelligence research agencies DARPA and IARPA, that sounds like just the sort of ambitious challenge worth tackling.

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My Comment: Searching for the ultimate unhackable and unbreakable crypto code .... I wish them luck.

Former East German Spies Find Work With NATO

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West Germans were desperate to prevent the Stasi's top codebreakers from falling into the wrong hands. They hatched a cunning plan that involved setting up a front company to hire the East German cryptographers. This photo shows a T-130 device, which East German officials used to encode their telex messages. Jens Raeder / NVA Museum Harnekop

Former Stasi Cryptographers Now Develop Technology For NATO -- Spiegel Online

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West Germans were desperate to prevent the Stasi's top codebreakers from falling into the wrong hands and set up a company to hire the East German cryptographers. Now the former Stasi scientists develop technology used by Angela Merkel and NATO.

Every morning, while going to his office in Berlin's Adlershof district, Ralph W. passes a reminder of his own past, a small museum that occupies a room on the ground floor of the building. The museum could easily double as a command center run by the class enemy in an old James Bond film. A display of coding devices from various decades includes the T-310, a green metal machine roughly the size of a huge refrigerator, which East German officials used to encode their telex messages.

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My Comment: A fascinating look into how former intelligence officers can be incorporated into the West.

Create The Ultimate Cryptographic Messages.

Entangle Qubits For A True Random Number Machine -- New Scientist

PURE randomness is surprisingly difficult to create, even if you draw on the inherent randomness of quantum mechanics. Now, though, a "true" random number generator is on the cards, which may help create the ultimate cryptographic messages.

Existing quantum random number generators are only as reliable as their parts. For example, some devices send single photons through a beam-splitter and record the path taken, but a pattern could emerge over time if the beam-splitter comes to favour one direction or the materials degrade. A new number generator produces random strings of numbers without the worry of such flaws, because it relies on the inherently random behaviour of two quantum-entangled objects.

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My Comment: The NSA cryptography division will be put out of business if this can be ultimately developed by everyone.

Mission Impossible: The Code Even The CIA Can't Crack

The sculpture named Kryptos at CIA headquarters contains a secret message — but not even the agency's brightest can crack its code. Photo: Adrian Gaut

From Wired Maagzine:

The most celebrated inscription at the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, used to be the biblical phrase chiseled into marble in the main lobby: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." But in recent years, another text has been the subject of intense scrutiny inside the Company and out: 865 characters of seeming gibberish, punched out of half-inch-thick copper in a courtyard.

It's part of a sculpture called Kryptos, created by DC artist James Sanborn. He got the commission in 1988, when the CIA was constructing a new building behind its original headquarters. The agency wanted an outdoor installation for the area between the two buildings, so a solicitation went out for a piece of public art that the general public would never see. Sanborn named his proposal after the Greek word for hidden. The work is a meditation on the nature of secrecy and the elusiveness of truth, its message written entirely in code.

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My Comment: This is so cool.