DailyDirt: Trust In Math

We'll know things are really going wrong when government authorities are trying to innovate their way around math. (And maybe we're already headed that way with backdoors to encryption.) Hopefully, though, we'll be able to trust in math for the foreseeable future, and nevermind about the Banach-Tarski paradox. Math is hard.

• If you thought that quantum cryptography would someday solve all the problems of unauthorized eavesdroppers, some researchers have shown that we'll have to be a bit more careful. Using the Bell inequality to check for attackers isn't necessarily sufficient to certify a quantum key distribution (QKD) as secure, as an eavesdropper could use some quantum hacking to compromise a system with fake detectors. Fortunately, some additional tests can reestablish security and protect against current and future attacks of a specific type. [url]
• Keeping anonymous communications networks anonymous is a bit harder if you can't guarantee there isn't an adversary with the resources to compromise a significant fraction of the network. One solution to this problem might be to include some obfuscation and noise to the network -- and as long as one out of three nodes isn't compromised, messages will be anonymous and untraceable. [url]
• The math challenge of 'graph isomorphism' is supposed to be tough, but if it's downgraded to a less difficult problem, then we might have to move away from number factoring for securing encryption. An algorithmic breakthrough for factoring could allow powerful computers to break into encrypted messages. This wouldn't be the first time we've had to change encryption methods, but this would be a significant development now, given the widespread use of encryption technology that relies on factoring. [url]

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