TechLetters #163 Romania hospitals paralysed with ransomware. Offensive cyber with generative AI. Quantum Shor factorisation is 4x easier. Encryption is legal, says European Court of Human Rights.
Security
Over 20 hospitals in Romania affected with a cyberattack. 79 of others unplugged. This may have consequences for human health. I remember when I was frafting the ICRC report on human cost of cyber operations. Let's hope nothing bad happens.
Cyberattacks/operations in context of Israel-Hamas activities. Including Iranian activities, etc. Typically ow-cost and low-impact. The report does not cover Israel's cyber operations, so except those professional and stealthy that we do not see, so not covered, unless that one treat actor (Gonjeshke…) is relevant here.
Offensive cyber operation already using generative AI. No wonder, no surprise either. "five state-affiliated actors disrupted that sought to use AI services in support of malicious cyber activities". China, North Korea, Iran, Russia.
Speedup up quantum factorisation with Shor algorithm! Or rather, reducing requirements. Instead of 2n (logical) qubits, n/2 needed. What does this mean? To break the RSA-2048 cipher, just 1700 qubits would be needed instead of ~5000. This is a huge leap, but this algorithm requires a very large number of Toffoli gates. These are quantum algorithm operations. For the algorithm to break RSA-2048, 2^36 ( 68719476736) are needed. Today running such an algorithm is impossible. No view of hardware with this number of logical qubits, nor gates. Furthermore, every quantum calculation carries an error (assume ~2%). If there are many calculations, the error builds up. The algorithm needs to be run 60 times. Impossible to execute today.
Exploitation of devices to see through walls via EM. Vulnerability in the digital image data transmission interface allows reconstruction of high-quality image streams from passive observations of cameras’ electromagnetic emissions leaks.
France detected another Russian disinformation operation. Portal Kombat "focused on the occupied Ukrainian territories and support from Ukraine - including France, Germany and Poland". Fake sites. Uses search engine optimization. Otherwise, not much fireworks in the report.
Privacy
Encryption is legal, mass weakening of encryption is not. European Court of Human Rights delivers a landmark ruling that data retention is unlawful, and end-to-end encryption is upheld as a right in a democratic society. This ruling puts fundamental limitations on any European Union attempts, too.
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