Two years ago, the SwissQuantum project was run as a cooperation between Id Quantique SA, the University of Geneva, and HES-SO (through the EIA-FR, the hepia as well as the HEIG-VD). The goal of this project, whose results have been demonstrated at Telecom’09, consisted in demonstrating that a triangular quantum key distribution network between the CERN, the hepia and the University of Geneva could run over a long time in a production environment.

A further goal, assigned to the HEIG-VD and its ICT institute (through Stefano Ventura, Patrick Monbaron, Raphaël Voirol and myself) was to integrate cryptographic keys generated by the quantum key-distribution layer into a standard IPSec stack.

A scientific paper, entitled “Long-term performance of the SwissQuantum quantum key distribution network in a field environment“, has been published yesterday into the New Journal of Physics, together with a press release. Here is the paper’s abstract:

In this paper, we report on the performance of the SwissQuantum quantum key distribution (QKD) network. The network was installed in the Geneva metropolitan area and ran for more than one-and-a-half years, from the end of March 2009 to the beginning of January 2011. The main goal of this experiment was to test the reliability of the quantum layer over a long period of time in a production environment. A key management layer has been developed to manage the key between the three nodes of the network. This QKD-secure network was utilized by end-users through an application layer.

And here is the press release:

Swiss Scientist Prove Durability of Quantum Network

ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2011) — Scientists and engineers have proven the worth of quantum cryptography in telecommunication networks by demonstrating its long-term effectiveness in a real-time network.

Their international network, created in collaboration with ID Quantique and installed in the Geneva metropolitan area and crossing over to the site of CERN in France, ran for more than one-and-a-half years from the end of March 2009 to the beginning of January 2011.

Published Dec. 2 in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society’s New Journal of Physics, the researchers’ study documents the longest ever deployment of a quantum key distribution (QKD) network and demonstrates its robustness and reliability when coupled with a real-time telecommunications network.

Cryptography — the practice of protecting information from third parties — has long been achieved by encrypting data with a set of complex mathematical algorithms; however, with the power of computers continuing to increase, it is becoming harder to make these algorithms watertight.

Physics has rather conveniently come up with a solution to this ever-growing problem through a process known as quantum key distribution (QKD). QKD is a process that enables two parties to share a secret key before using that key to protect data they want to send over a network.

The key that the two parties share is built up from a stream of photons — the basic unit of light. In a theoretical scenario where Alice and Bob want to protect a piece of information with a quantum key, Alice would send a stream of photons to Bob with each one having a specific orientation, called polarisation: photons can ‘spin’ vertically, horizontally and diagonally.

Bob would then attempt to measure the photons coming in by randomly choosing which direction to measure them in. Sometimes he will choose the correct orientation, other times he won’t. Alice and Bob would then share the measurements using classical communication methods, simply stating if Bob was right or wrong, but not mentioning the actual direction the photons were spinning in.

Alice can then discard all of Bob’s wrong measurements and use the correct ones to encrypt their secret data. The beauty of QKD is that if a potential eavesdropper wanted to get hold of this key, they would actually destroy the photons when trying to measure them. As a result, they would need to send their own stream of photons on to Bob to cover their tracks, but this would introduce errors and be discarded during key distillation.

QKD is not a new phenomenon and has already been used for a number of applications: notably by ID Quantique to protect the votes in Geneva’s elections and in other commercial installations where high security is needed.

For QKD to become more widespread in the commercial world, its reliability needed to be thoroughly tested as these networks run constantly all year round. Furthermore, the robustness of the network needed to be demonstrated as the systems are being taken out of safeguarded laboratories and placed into more demanding environments.

Co-author of the study Dr Damien Stucki said: “This experiment is a big step in the direction of a wider deployment of QKD in telecommunications networks. From a scientific point of view, the deployment of the quantum layer over a duration of 21 months with high reliability is very significant.

“The SwissQuantum network was very reliable, with the only interruptions coming from external problems, such as power cuts and air conditioning problems, not the QKD layer.”

As everybody knows, Steve Jobs just passed away. As a small tribute to this incredible human being, I copy-paste here the talk he gave to newly-graduated students of Stanford University (June 14th, 2005). It’s about luck, life and death.

A video recording is also available.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

A new volume edited by Anne Canteaut and myself, published by IOS Press and entitled “Advanced Linear Cryptanalysis of Block and Stream Ciphers” is ready to be printed. As a teaser, here is the preface:

Linear cryptanalysis, whose original ideas can be traced back to the seminal works of Anne Tardy-Corfdir and Henri Gilbert, A Known Plaintext Attack of FEAL-4 and FEAL-6, presented at Crypto’91, as well as the now classical paper of Eurocrypt’93 by Mitsuru Matsui, Linear Cryptanalyis of DES Cipher, has quickly demonstrated to be one of the most efficient ways to break symmetrical cryptographic primitives.

Since its invention in the early 90s, several theoretical and practical aspects of this technique have been well studied, understood and generalized, resulting on the one hand in much more elaborated attacks against certain ciphers and on the other hand, in some negative results regarding the potential of various attempts of generalization. We believe that the field is now sufficiently mature to take a snapshot of its current state and look at future potential developments. This volume aims at giving a recent state-of-the-art in the discipline, and to expose its latest developments. It consists of five parts:

• The first part, written by Baudoin Collard and François-Xavier Standaert, provides a thorough treatement and an experimental survey of the basic assumptions in linear cryptanalysis and their consequences for the design of modern block ciphers.

• The second part, written by Miia Hermelin and Kaisa Nyberg, is exposing a theory of multidimensional linear attacks on block ciphers.

• The third part, written by Martin Hell and Thomas Johansson, is a survey of how linear attacks can be applied on stream ciphers that gives an overview of the development of linear attacks as well as a theoretical explanation on how a linear attack on a stream cipher is typically launched today.

• The fourth part, written by Benoît Gérard and Jean-Pierre Tillich, details several interesting and useful links between linear cryptanalysis and coding theory.

• Finally, the fifth part, written by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, discusses how correlation analysis can be conducted at the level of elements of GF(2ⁿ) without having to deal with field representation issues.

We hope that the contents of this book will be useful and appreciated by anybody willing to dive into this fascinating, yet complex part of symmetrical cryptanalysis. Finally, we would like to warmly thank many people: the authors of the five parts, for their high-quality contributions; Raphael C.-W. Phan, a coordinating editor of the Information for Cryptology and Information Security Series published by IOS Press, for having proposed us to edit a volume related to linear cryptanalysis; and Maarten Fröhlich, Carry Koolbergen and Maureen Twaig, from IOS Press, for their patience with respect to the numerous missed deadlines and the smooth publishing process.

Anne Canteaut (INRIA) and Pascal Junod (HEIG-VD), August 2011