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“Threshold Cryptography” Bolsters Protection of Sensitive Data
A new publication by NIST cryptography experts proposes the direction the technical agency will take to develop a more secure approach to encryption. This approach, called threshold cryptography, could overcome some of the limitations of conventional methods for protecting sensitive transactions and data.
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China’s Quantum Satellite Enables First Totally Secure Long-Range Messages
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.
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Beyond 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.
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Toward an Unhackable Quantum Internet
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.
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Quantum Computers Will Break the Internet, but Only If We Let Them
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.
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Bolstering 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.
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Preventing 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?
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How 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.
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If 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.
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A 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.
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Encryption “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.
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Homomorphic 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.
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An 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.
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Setting 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.
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Secure 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.
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More headlines
The long view
Encryption Breakthrough Lays Groundwork for Privacy-Preserving AI Models
In an era where data privacy concerns loom large, a new approach in artificial intelligence (AI) could reshape how sensitive information is processed. New AI framework enables secure neural network computation without sacrificing accuracy.