• Quantum encryptionChina’s Quantum Satellite Enables First Totally Secure Long-Range Messages

    By Harun Šiljak

    In the middle of the night, invisible to anyone but special telescopes in two Chinese observatories, satellite Micius sends particles of light to Earth to establish the world’s most secure communication link. Micius is the world’s first quantum communications satellite and has, for several years, been at the forefront of quantum encryption. Scientists have now reported using this technology to reach a major milestone: long-range secure communication you could trust even without trusting the satellite it runs through.

  • EncryptionBeyond Encryption: Protecting Privacy While Keeping Survey Results Accurate

    Consumer data is continuously being collected by various organizations, including local governments, marketing agencies and social media companies. These organizations assure anonymity and confidentiality when collecting this data, however, existing data privacy laws don’t guarantee that data breaches won’t occur. Data privacy laws require encryption and, in some cases, transforming the original data to “protected data” before it’s released to external parties, but experts say this is inadequate.

  • CybersecurityToward an Unhackable Quantum Internet

    By Leah Burrows

    A quantum internet could be used to send un-hackable messages, improve the accuracy of GPS, and enable cloud-based quantum computing. For more than twenty years, dreams of creating such a quantum network have remained out of reach in large part because of the difficulty to send quantum signals across large distances without loss. Researchers have found a way to correct for signal loss.

  • CybersecurityQuantum Computers Will Break the Internet, but Only If We Let Them

    By Marissa Norris

    Tomorrow’s quantum computers are expected to be millions of times faster than the device you’re using right now. Whenever these powerful computers take hold, it will be like going from a Ford Model T to the Starship Enterprise. Hackers may soon be able to expose all digital communications by using advanced quantum computers. A new form of cryptography would stop them, but it needs to be put into place now.

  • CybersecurityBolstering Internet Security

    An innovative protection against website counterfeiting developed by Princeton researchers went live on the internet two months ago, on 19 February, boosting security for hundreds of millions of websites. The rollout was the culmination of over two years of close collaboration between research groups at Princeton and Let’s Encrypt, the world’s largest certificate authority serving 200 million websites.

  • CybersecurityPreventing Quantum Cyberattacks

    From defense and health information to social networking and banking transactions, communications increasingly rely on cryptographic security amid growing fears of cyberattacks. However, can such sensitive data be unhackable?

  • CybersecurityHow Secure Are 4- and 6-Digit Mobile Phone PINs

    Apple and Android implement a number of measures to protect their users’ devices. An international team of IT security experts has investigated how useful they are. They found that six-digit PINs actually provide little more security than four-digit ones. They also showed that the blacklist used by Apple to prevent particularly frequent PINs could be optimized and that it would make even greater sense to implement one on Android devices.

  • PerspectiveIf We Build It (They Will Break In)

    Attorney General William Barr has staked his ground in the long-running debate over law enforcement access to encrypted communications. Last fall, Barr criticized end-to-end encryption as “enabling dangerous criminals to cloak their communications and activities behind an essentially impenetrable digital shield.” As the debate continues, commentators and policymakers often overlook a historical example of the problems with law enforcement access.

  • EncryptionA First: All-Optical Stealth Encryption Technology

    Researchers have unveiled the first all-optical “stealth” encryption technology that will be significantly more secure and private for highly sensitive cloud-computing and data center network transmission.

  • Election securityEncryption “Backdoors” Would Weaken Election Security: Election Protection Coalition

    A coalition working on improving elections security sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr Wednesday, criticizing the AG for recent comments he made in he called on tech companies to create a “backdoor” in their devices. The backdoor would allow law enforcement to examine the communications of individuals arrested on suspicion of committing crimes or engaging in terrorism.

  • EncryptionHomomorphic Encryption Improves Cloud Security

    A new approach to encryption — homomorphic encryption system — could improve user perception of cloud computing services where the users are concerned about private or personal data being exposed to third parties.

  • PerspectiveAn Open Source Effort to Encrypt the Internet of Things

    End-to-end encryption is a staple of secure messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal. Such encryption ensures that no one—even the app developer or the device manufacturer—can access the user’s data as it travels the web. “But what if you could bring some version of that protection to increasingly ubiquitous—and notoriously insecure—Internet of Things devices?” asks Lili Hay Newman.

  • EncryptionSetting New Record for Cracking Encryption Keys

    An international team of computer scientists had set a new record for two of the most important computational problems which are the basis for nearly all of the public-key cryptography which is currently used in the real world.

  • CybersecuritySecure Data Transmission with Ultrasound

    Due to the Internet of Things (IoT), an increasing number of devices have learned to communicate with each other. Ultrasound communication is an entirely new method for data exchange between IoT devices and mobile phones. Researchers have now developed a first open communication protocol including an open-source development kit for ultrasound communication which makes near-field communication safer.

  • PerspectiveDon’t Rush Quantum-Proof Encryption, Warns NSA Research Director

    In 1994, Peter Shor, a mathematician, discovered a way to crack the codes that banks, e-commerce platforms, and intelligence agencies use to secure their digital information. “Shor’s algorithm” drastically shortened the time it took to find the prime numbers that underlie public-key cryptography, making codes that typically take thousands of years to break solvable in a matter of months. Jack Corrigan writes that there was a catch: Shor’s algorithm could run only on quantum computers, and they did not exist twenty-five years ago. They are much closer today, and this has many security experts worried.