It is an open secret, i.e., no secret at all, that the NSA finances fundamental research in mathematics and physics that it deems relevant to its critical listening-in/code-breaking missions, as do the other Five-eyes components.
Historically this support has been much more important for the relevant mathematics than for the relevant physics. (The physics often involves big-ticket international undertakings that have very different primary objectives.) Even the support for relevant mathematics has become much less important in recent years for two reasons. First, rapidly growing interest in network security has made alternative funding sources available. Second, these alternative sources do not impose restrictions upon the publication of results in the open mathematical literature. The interest of the NSA in all this understandable. Quantum encryption can in principle make unbreakable encoding schemes available, thus defeating its mission. In some sense it has already done so, but the efficiency of such schemes was until recently very poor, in the sense that the fraction of a transmission necessarily devoted to monitoring signal disturbance in order to detect intrusion/decryption attempts was very large, impractically so. This situation is, however, changing rapidly. Those interested in these matters should read Sasaki, Toshihito, Yoshihisa Yamamoto, and Masato Koashi. "Practical quantum key distribution protocol without monitoring signal disturbance". Nature, volume 509, Issue 7501, 22 May 2014. 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
