http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/Ottawa+physicist+uses+science+generate+truly+random+numbers/5779618/story.html By Tom Spears Postmedia News November 28, 2011 OTTAWA -- An Ottawa physicist has developed a way to generate random numbers, the key to encrypting data in ways that hackers can't figure out. Ben Sussman builds quantum technologies at the National Research Council. He's tapping into the fact that at the tiny (or quantum) scale of photons and electrons, events don't follow our familiar ideas of cause and effect, and can happen in completely random ways. To people who want to encrypt data, this is a potential source of randomly-chosen numbers that are used as a "key" to lock and unlock sensitive data — military transmissions, banking transactions, or your email. The idea is that if no one knows how the key was created in the first place, hackers and code-breakers won't be able to figure out the secret and decode the messages. [...] _____________________________________________________ Subscribe to InfoSec News - www.infosecnews.org http://www.infosecnews.org/mailman/listinfo/isnReceived on Wed Nov 30 2011 - 01:38:30 PST
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