David Crayford's interpolated comments in Shane Ginnane's post: <begin extracts> And since the data is already on Amazons elastic cloud they can spin off a hundred thousand node supercomputer and crack your encryption in a matter of seconds . . . . . . I wouldn't include the UK with the rest of Europe. They're in cahoots! </end extracts>
merit comment. It is true that text encrypted using DES and its lineal descendants can be decrypted readily by any entity that has the necessary computing capacity. Perhaps defensible in the past, their continued use [as more than a gesture of reassurance] is now wholly indefensible; and the indefensible is not enough. There are, however, alternatiives available. They are well described in Ekert, Artur, and Renato Renner. "The ultimate physical limits of privacy", Nature, volume 507, pp, 443-447, 27 March 2014. This paper is accessible to anyone having an engineering or scientific education but not, unfortunately, to others; and it contains an excellent, well annotated bibliography. The methods of quantum cryptography it discusses make no use of a key or the like kept secret. They cannot be broken They exploit Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle instead About the culpability of the UK two quite different things need to be said. First, it is an active member, and not at all a junior partner in, Five Eyes, a consortium of the signal intelligence agencies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UInited Kingdom, and the United States. In this sense it is certainly "in cahoots". Its domestic privacy legislation is, on the other hand, much stronger than that of the US; and this legislation is enforced effectively against all but government itself by the UK's still independent courts. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
