Nico @nico@infosec.exchange

Very interesting read on the background story of #tor 's #snowflake, a tool that gained a lot of popularity recently for enabling people in #Iran to access uncensored Internet.

> When the internet is compromised, not only will you be unable to reliably communicate with friends, family, and the world, your reality itself will be compromised.

https://serene.cx/snowflake/

As part of our funding of Briar Desktop at the beginning of this year, we were interview by the Prototype Fund and talked about several different things related to the project: what is so special about Briar, why it's more secure than others, how it works as a community project, and why we don't want to become the number 1 messenger in the world.

The interview was held in German, but you may want to use machine translation to read it in your language:

https://nico.dorfbrunnen.eu/posts/2022/briar-ptf-interview/

Don't be scared of actually reading the paper “Scalable Networks for Simultaneous Pairwise Quantum Key Distribution via Entanglement-Based Time-Bin Coding”!

https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/abstract/10.1103/PRXQuantum.3.020341

It's Open Access (CC-BY 4.0) and if you got any questions, I'm happy to answer them. In case I don't know the answer, I'll ask the right people to get your questions answered :)

With quantum computers breaking most if not all of our currently used public-key cryptography, #quantum #cryptography offers a secure alternative. “Secure” as in information-theoretically secure, i.e., unbreakable.

For anybody interested in the current developments in this field, the research group I work at published an interesting article about their current work in the journal #PRX Quantum:

https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/universitaet/aktuelles_meldungen/einzelansicht_369408.en.jsp

@Blort Oh, I'm not too much into post-quantum cryptography, so I can't really say how good our chances are there. Still I'm optimistic about it, since it's a topic researched _a lot_ all around the globe. I think we'll be able to play the cat and mouse game for some time and invent new mathematical problems that at least for the time being act as trapdoor function, until we find a proper one. Sure, there's still the problem about recorded encrypted data.

@wildeagle5 Nice to meet you!

I also had some basic classes in quantum mechanics, but stuff like 2 photons interferring even if they are at completely different places still blows my mind.

It's called ”Two-Photon-Interference according to #Franson“, if you want to look it up. It's quite important in our #QKD system, as that ensures that Alice and Bob note the same 0 or 1 bit after the photons passing the interferometers.

https://www.quantumlab.nat.fau.de/english/franson/index.html#:~:text=Interference%20of%20a%20photon%20pair,interference%20by%20a%20Michelson%20interferometer.

@nixfreak Well, they lack some comfort of centralized networks, but I think they are the only way forward. Thanks to cryptography quite some comfort can be restored or even improved, e.g., by using Shamir's Secret Sharing to backup your Briar account across your friends.

@rysiek Yeah, just found out how to feature them from my account 🙂

@briar @fdroidorg

Thanks to @rysiek for pointing me towards infosec.exchange without knowing it. After months of following people through various different browser tabs I figured that it's a good thing to finally open an account on this fediverse thing here.

Hey all! I just joined the fediverse and found that it's a nice thing to start with an #introduction.

My name is Nico Alt, you might don't know me but if you do, it's most probably due to the stuff I did at #Briar and #FDroid. Currently I'm not active there but instead focus on university/#physics stuff where I contribute my little part to #quantum #cryptography (multi-party #BBM92 time-bin coding, to be more specific). Other interests are #p2p and #tor, feel free to talk to me about them!