As computing power continues to increase, previously unbreakable forms of encryption have crumbled. Now, though, we appear to be on the verge of what may be truly unbreakable quantum encryption. It’s possible in the not too distant future no one will be able to spy on a message secured with these advanced methods no matter how long they hammer at it. Researchers are now looking to take things one step further and completely camouflage a message so no one even knows that a message was sent in the first place.
If you can’t even risk an eavesdropper knowing that a message has been sent, let alone what it says, you need a covert communication system. That’s the idea at the heart of a new experiment conducted at the University of Massachusetts. Researchers there have developed a method of using photons to make a message invisible to everyone but the intended recipient.
So how are carefully timed pulses of light in any way covert? The technique assumes very short pulses of photons are being used, and the environment (like a laser or fiber optic cable) contains a large number of photons that are completely unrelated to the message. They also assume that optical sensors are not perfect, and will always have unavoidable dark counts — when a detector registers a photon that didn’t actually exist. That means an eavesdropper (that’s “Willie” in the diagram above) would be unable to distinguish the coded message from background noise — like it never happened. By spreading the message out over longer time intervals, the effective bitrate is lowered, allowing it to sink even more deeply into the background.
The IBM Temonstrates next-gen phase-change memory thats up to 275 times faster
IBM has demonstrated a new type of memory technology that the company believes could one day be a replacement for NAND flash. The company’s Theseus Project (conducted in cooperation with the University of Patras in Greece) is the first attempt to combine phase change memory, conventional NAND, and DRAM on a single controller. The result? A hybridized storage solution that outperforms PCIe-based SSDs by between 12 and 275 times.
Phase change memory has much lower latency than NAND, much faster read/write times (in theory), and it can withstand millions of write cycles as compared to 30,000 with high-end SLC NAND and as few as 1,000 with TLC NAND. Even better, it’s well positioned compared to other theoretical memory devices. Even so, NAND flash has enormous economies of scale and billions invested in fab plants across the world. What IBM has done with Theseus is to incorporate a small amount of PCM into a hybrid structure where its ultra-low-latency characteristics can be effectively leveraged.
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