News The End of encryption?

That's the poser put forward by /.

The encryption algorithms that make virtually all electronic commerce possible work only because certain mathematical problems are very, very hard to solve. But some mathematicians are trying to prove that there's really no difference between 'hard' and 'not hard' problems--known in the math biz as P and NP.

The story links to this article over at Technology Review:

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.

But what if a fundamental breakthrough in mathematics rendered useless all of the fancy encryption that the world now depends upon?

More here

 

The real question here is whether every language accepted by some nondeterministic algorithm in polynomial time is also accepted by some (deterministic) algorithm in polynomial time. as stated by Stephen Cook.

Mathematicians around the world are trying to solve this problem with hardly any luck... so far! It's even hard enough that they're (Clay Mathematics Institute ) awarding a 1 000 000$ prize to whoever can solve this problem. Since mathematicians still don't know the answer to this question, we can't assume that P == NP. Until proven otherwise, encryption will still be nearly unbreakable with today's technology.

Personally, I strongly believe that P is not equal to NP... even if I wished it weren't the case.

 

It's all about the language. Formulate a mathematical language to fit P and NP, and they will fit each other

Don't ask me to do it though... maybe in a decade I'll give it a shot

 

It was bored mathmetitions that invented algebra and calculus... I'm sure we can handle this. Not sure whether we should or not... personally I find any computer security measure to be a huge pain but then again I don't store credit card numbers or confidential info on my hard drive.

 

So just as soon as they invent quantum computers to check all the possibilities at once, no more encryption eh? Whats new about this concept?

 

It's "Sneakers" all over again.

 

No more *conventional* encryption. With quantum computers comes quantum encryption, as was mentioned above