Secure Video Conferencing via Quantum Cryptography

Roland Piquepaille writes "If you use a webcam to talk with your mom, this tool is not for you. But if you're working for a company and that you have to routinely discuss about sensitive future projects or the possible acquisition of another company, you need more security, and this new video conferencing system based on quantum cryptography is a tool you need. According to this article from Nature, researchers from Toshiba have developed a system which can generate 100 quantum 'keys' every second, fast enough to protect every frame in a video exchange. This technology, which today is working over a distance of about 120 kilometers, could become commercially available within two years at an initial cost of $20,000. This overview contains more details and references."

THE TRUTH ABOUT ROLAND PIQUEPAILLE

[Anonymous Coward]

I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/ [primidi.com]. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers".

Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now let's talk about money. Visit BlogAds to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at Network Solutions ). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced ( link ) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is roughly, at the time of this writing, $130 USD. Assuming Roland Piquepaille pays for the Clarahost Advanced hosting service, he is out $130 leaving him with a maximum net profit of $650 each month. Keeping your website registered with Network Solutions cost $34.99 per year, or about $3 per month. This leaves Roland Piquepaille with $647 each month. He may pay for additional services related to his online journal, but I was unable to find any evidence of this.

All of the above are cold, hard, verifiable facts, except where stated otherwise. Now I will give you my personal opinion

Re:THE TRUTH ABOUT ROLAND PIQUEPAILLE

[benjamin_pont]

How does this kind of thing happen? Just curious.

benjamin_pont's Recent Submissions

Title
Quantum leap in secure web video

Datestamp
Friday April 29, @02:09PM Rejected

Re:excellent

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

Three words: Remote Military Applications. The benefits of this technology to the military stretch far beyond normal and even ultra secret communications; they could remotely control battle robots, or even properly equipped tanks, without fear of interference or subversion. This is especially interesting considering the latest drones in use by the US military.

You can find a lot of people to fight your wars, but they are expensive to train, unreliable, and to gain experience they need to risk serious injury or death. On the other hand, you can mass produce battle robots to extremely precise specifications, and control them safely from a command bunker many kilometers away with this technology.

Let's use a buzzword!

[Bender0x7D1]

There is nothing really exciting about this other than the overkill usage of quantum cryptography (also called quantum key exchange).

Basically, they are trying to generate enough keys so any succesful breaking of the cipher used gets only one frame of video. The only "exciting" part is they are using quantum cryptography to do this. However, this is like using a sledgehammer to push in a thumb tack - It uses a lot more hardware, and isn't the easiest or best method.

Another way to do this would be to conduct a large number of Diffie-Hellman key exchanges [rsasecurity.com] or STS exchanges, (one for each frame), and use the new key for each frame.
Or, even easier, both sides could use identical Linear Feedback Shift Registers to generate the same keys that they need. They cost way less than $20k and since a compromise of the system at either end would destroy the privacy afforded by the quantum encryption, just as secure.
Or, they could exchange one-time pads on a DVD and use the bits on there as the key. If my math is right, then a 4GB CD could hold enough keys for over 1100 hours of video, assuming a 256 bit key and 30 frames/sec. Exchanging 2 or 3 DVDs a year (if that) doesn't seem unreasonable.

None of these methods require a dedicated fiber line connecting the two groups. It can be performed over regular Ethernet if the groups want to. Translation: I can use it to talk to someone more than 120km away.

This isn't to say that some groups wouldn't want quantum security for something - if I was a Swiss bank that made daily transfers of a billion dollars to a German or Italian or French bank, then sure, I should spend the extra couple hundred k for an obscenely secure system.

This also begs the question of why encrypt each frame differently? Since it is VIDEO, then something in the picture is probably important - like a PowerPoint slide or graph or something. Since a presenter usually spends a minute or two on each slide, this means that an attacker would only need to decrypt one out of every 1800 slides (assuming 30 frames/second) to get the information they wanted. I think that it is a good idea to change keys as often as possible, but you have to ask what is the benefit for the added cost/overhead. In this case, I don't think it is very much.

So nice use of the "quantum cryptography" buzzword, but bad application of crypto technology in general.

Re:Um, what about a VPN?

[buffoverflow]

Way off base? Yes very much so. Quantum cryptography is currently considered unbreakable. With even the strongest standard ciphers, AES, serpent, twofish, etc, there are a variety of methods of attack; whether it is against the algorithm, the keys, or the implementation.

With quantum cryptography, an attack it basically impossible, as any attempt to intercept the communications (tapping the fiber) causes an interruption to the photons, and the entire exchange stops.

For the most part, using a VPN with strong ciphers for a transform (IPSec+AES+HMAC) is more than enough for almost any application. This would really be a limited "niche" solution.

Diffie-Hellman slightly less secure

[Autobahn]

While I agree with the thrust of your post, there's one bone I have to pick.

Diffie-Hellman and all other nominal one-way functions haven't been proven secure - it could well be possible that one-way functions don't exist, in which case all security based on them is worthless. Even if OWFs do exist and Diffie-Hellman is one it is still breakable in exponential time, which is vulnerable if quantum computers (or equivalent) are developed, and could potentially be vulnerable to a specially-designed supercomputer. OTOH a functional quantum link is completely eavesdrop-proof when proper protocols are used.

Sure, most people don't have to worry about a secret D-H/OWF inverting algorithm, but for the NSA and some of the other people this is targeted at even that tiny bit of extra security is incredibly valuable.

The amount of money pouring into quantum cryptography almost makes you wonder if the NSA might have found that OWFs do not exist...

Re:Just becase they can

[m50d]

The basic idea is there are two measurements you can carry out, but making the wrong one will destroy the information. The sender generates a random bitstream and encodes it using random choices of which method. The receiver makes one measurement at random for each photon they get. Then, after the measurements have been made and the photons destroyed, the sender tells the receiver which encodings were used and the receiver tells the sender which bits are correct. These bits are random - the sender cannot choose which they are - but it doesn't matter, since they're only going to be used as a key. Once the key has been exchanged like this, then the sender encrypts. This is a practical delay like with diffie-hellman-merkle - the receiver has to be online to recieve the key before the message itself can be sent.