• ENCRYPTIONFighting European Threats to Encryption: 2023 Year in Review

    By Christoph Schmon, Joe Mullin, and Paige Collings

    Private communication is a fundamental human right. In the online world, the best tool we have to defend this right is end-to-end encryption. Yet throughout 2023, politicians across Europe attempted to undermine encryption, seeking to access and scan our private messages and pictures.

  • ENCRYPTIONQuantum-Safe Cryptography

    Cryptography researchers have created an algorithm that can help strengthen online transactions that use end-to-end encryption against powerful attacks from quantum computers.

  • ENCRYPTIONNew Quantum Device Generates Single Photons and Encodes Information

    Innovative approach is a step toward using single photons in quantum communication and information processing. Further coupling of the photon stream into waveguides — microscopic conduits of light — would provide the photonic circuits that allow the propagation of photons in one direction. Such circuits would be the fundamental building blocks of an ultra-secure quantum internet.

  • ENCRYPTIONNew Message Encryption Scheme Inspired by the Sudoku Puzzle

    Researchers discuss a novel advance in data security in which the Japanese puzzle known as Sudoku promises a cryptographic system for text information that works even in situations where computational power is limited.

  • ENCRYPTIONThe U.K. Government Is Very Close to Eroding Encryption Worldwide

    By Joe Mullin

    The Online Safety Bill, now at the final stage before passage in the House of Lords, gives the British government the ability to force backdoors into messaging services, which will destroy end-to-end encryption. If it passes, the Online Safety Bill will be a huge step backwards for global privacy, and democracy itself.

  • ENCRYPTIONQuantum Technology for Mobile Phone Encryption Nears

    In a few years, protection of communication with quantum encryption may become a permanent fixture in mobile phones and thus protect communication from hacking. The technology has already been demonstrated in large data transfers in the financial sector.

  • ENCRYPTIONQuantum Cryptography Applications

    The development of quantum computing means that the use of classic cryptography for secure communications is in danger of becoming obsolete. Quantum cryptography, on the other hand, uses the laws of quantum mechanics to ensure total security. One example of this is quantum key distribution, which enables two parties to secure a message via a random secret key.

  • CYBERSECURITYUsing Quantum Physics to Secure Wireless Devices

    From access cards and key fobs to Bluetooth speakers, the security of communication between wireless devices is critical to maintaining privacy and preventing theft. Unfortunately, these tools are not foolproof and information on how to hack, clone and bypass these systems is becoming easier to find.

  • ENCRYPTIONNew and Secure Encryption: A Fresh Approach

    Cryptography, i.e. the encryption of information, keeps us safe in our daily lives and yet we barely know it’s there. As digitalization progresses, the amount of data that needs to be protected is growing exponentially. This calls for exceptionally robust cryptographic solutions that are both fast and efficient in practice and, at the same time, absolutely secure.

  • SECURE COMMUNICATIONPerfectly Secure Digital Communications

    Researchers have achieved a breakthrough in secure communications by developing an algorithm that conceals sensitive information so effectively that it is impossible to detect that anything has been hidden.

  • CRYPTOGRAPHYNIST Selects ‘Lightweight Cryptography’ Algorithms to Protect Small Devices

    The algorithms are designed to protect data created and transmitted by the Internet of Things and other small electronics.

  • ENCRYPTIONTop Prosecutors in CA, NY and DC Are Speaking Up for End-to-End Encryption

    We all should have the ability to have a private conversation, and it follows that we need ways to communicate privately online as well. In the digital world, end-to-end encryption is our best chance to maintain our privacy and security.

  • QUANTUM TECHNOLOGYNobel-Winning Quantum Weirdness Undergirds an Emerging High-Tech Industry, Promising Better Ways of Encrypting Communications and Imaging Your Body

    By Nicholas Peters

    There are several emerging technologies which rely on the non-intuitive quantum phenomenon of entanglement: Unhackable communications devices, high-precision GPS and high-resolution medical imaging. For the most part, quantum entanglement is still a subject of physics research, but it’s also a component of commercially available technologies, and it plays a starring role in the emerging quantum information processing industry.

  • PERSPECTIVE: RETROSPECTIVE DECRYPTIONA Retrospective Post-Quantum Policy Problem

    In May 2022, a White House memorandum warned that a quantum computer of sufficient size and sophistication will be capable of breaking much of the public-key cryptography used on digital systems across the United States and around the world. The various steps taken by the administration, and proposed by lawmakers, to deal with the problem are all forward-looking. “However, despite these efforts, policymakers have given little or no attention to what could be called a retrospectivepost-quantum problem,” Herb Lin writes. “Policymakers would be wise to consider the very real possibility that in a PQC[post-quantum computing] world, messages they once believed would be kept secret could in fact be made public.”

  • CYBERSECURITYNSF Grants to Protect Data, User privacy

    Researchers are working on two new cybersecurity projects, recently funded by the National Science Foundation, to ensure trustworthy cloud computing and increase computing privacy for marginalized and vulnerable populations.