Researchers find security holes in present encryption tech

In this connected world, much of the devices and systems use data encryption for security. How safe is this data encryption? Well, researchers found it is not so secure as we thought. Researchers at MIT and the National University of Ireland (NUI) at Maynooth finds the present encryption technology is not as secure as we thought, the wireless card readers used in many keyless-entry systems may not be that secure. “We thought we’d establish that the basic premise that everyone was using was fair and reasonable,” says Ken Duffy, one of the researchers at NUI. “And it turns out that it’s not.” On both papers, Duffy is joined by his student Mark Christiansen; Muriel Médard, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT; and her student Flávio du Pin Calmon. The Shannon entropy used in information-theoretic analysis of secure systems is said to be wrong notion of entropy. Shannon entropy, which is based on the average probability is alright for use in communications system, where the characteristics of the data traffic will quickly converge to the statistical averages. But in cryptography, the real concern isn’t with the average case but with the worst case, as per the researchers. The hacker/code-breaker needs only one reliable correlation between the encrypted and unencrypted versions of a file to deduce further correlations. Information theorists have developed other noti...