Seminar: Breaking the Unbreakable: Cyber-electronic Warfare Against Quantum Cryptosystems

Naser  Jam

Breaking the Unbreakable: Cyber-electronic Warfare Against Quantum Cryptosystems

Date: 20.05.2020

Time: 14:00

Location: This meeting will be held ONLINE. Please send an e-mail to gizem.bakir@ozyegin.edu.tr in order to participate in this defense.

Abstract:   

A new desolating security breach in the physical nature the quantum key distribution is going to be disclosed. It is actually a cyber-physical attack invented by Dr. Kadir Durak, head of the quantum optics lab of the Ozyegin University that is going to be a game-changer in the quantum key distribution security.

The superexponential time scales of the solutions provided by quantum computers will likely soon break traditional public-key cryptography, including the ciphers protecting most of the world’s digital secrets. There are many accelerating efforts in the development of new quantum-resistant algorithms but none of them can claim to provide absolute security against future quantum algorithms. It seems that the only reliable solution on hand at this time that claims absolute security, in theory, is quantum cryptography.In fact, practical implementations often deviate from the theory, which leaves loopholes for eavesdropping, especially in the physical layer.

we found that the bit contents of a quantum key transmission system can be intercepted from far away by exploiting the ultrawideband electromagnetic signals radiated from the hi-voltage avalanche effect of single-photon detectors. It means that in fact, any Geiger mode avalanche photodiode that is used inside single-photon detectors systematically acts like a downconverter that converts the optical-wavelength photons to radio-wavelength photons that can be intercepted by an antenna. Our experiment showed that the radiated waveforms of commercial photon detectors captured by an antenna can be used as a fingerprint. These fingerprints were fed to a deep learning neural network as training data, and after training the neural network was able to clone the bit content of the quantum transmission.

Bio: 

Naser Jam earned his bachelor of science in electrical engineering from Sharif University, Tehran, Iran. After graduation, he worked as an engineer, designer and project manager in Radar and communications projects at the electronic research center of Sharif University. From 2018 he joined Ozyegin university and now he is a graduate student and a member of the quantum optics lab.