Is Encryption Doomed?

KingFishKingFish
edited September 2004 in Science & Tech
Our entire information society rests on a fragile foundation that mathematicians are racing to dismantle.
It's not often that results from conferences on mathematics make the news, but that's precisely what happened last month at the annual Crypto conference in Santa Barbara, CA when researchers from France, Israel, and China all showed that they had discovered flaws in a widely used algorithm called MD5—an algorithm that I wrote about in some detail last month. The "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade" message that came out of the conference was that this process of breaking codes and developing even stronger ones is all part of the cryptographer’s game.
Source: Technology Review

Comments

  • entropyentropy Yah-Der-Hey (Wisconsin)
    edited September 2004
    I just read about this like an hour before you posted it. And what they're talking about is odd - a computer being able to simultaneously attempt EVERY combination? Come again? And they said there wouldn't be anything even close for a long time, when we'll have something new I'm sure.
  • CyrixInsteadCyrixInstead Stoke-on-Trent, England Icrontian
    edited September 2004
    I thought that was these new fangled quantum computers. They can calculate the answer to any solution instantly (by trying every combination), however the problem is identifying the correct solution.

    ~Cyrix
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