Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – ID Quantique, a leader in the business of network encryption, is focusing its business into three units, in order to simplify the face it presents to its customers. Grégoire Ribordy, CEO, says that the restructuring is “a new stage in the company’s life” and reflects the opportunities each business unit presents and the need for diversification in sometimes difficult markets.
Growth in the network encryption business was slow in 2009, Ribordy told GenevaLunch, but was nicely compensated for by strong growth in random number generation (RNG) and scientific instrumentation.
Light bounces off a translucent mirror to generate random numbers. © 2009 id Quantique SA
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Geneva’s citizens voted in favour of every one of the issues on the ballot yesterday 27 September, and 60,000 of them voted over the internet. That includes about 10,000 Swiss citizens abroad who were able to vote electronically for the first time. The security of voting over the internet is of great concern to election officials everywhere, and they try to make sure that the vote is tamper-proof.
The Geneva cantonal information technology department worked with local firm id Quantique to produce the random numbers that found their way onto the electronic voting-enabled voting cards, in the form of a Pin number.
id Quantique has invented and marketed a quantum random number generator (QRNG), a machine that works on the quantum level to generate random numbers. Truly random numbers are impossible to duplicate. And computers are not good at generating random numbers because computers are very good at executing instructions.
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Mathematicians at EPFL, the Swiss federal polytechnic institute, used a cluster of more than 200 PlayStation 3 game consoles to spend six months solving an encryption problem, breaking a previous record set in 2002. The laboratory for cryptologic algorithms cracked a 112-bit encryption based on elliptical curves. The significance of the work is that it “may serve to boost our confidence in the strength of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC),” say the authors, led Joppe Bos and Marcelo Kaihara. Encryption is widely used in banking and other industries for security. The encryption industry struggles to stay ahead of code-cracking hackers, who are using increasingly sophisticated methods and calculators.
A 160-bit elliptical curve standard is scheduled to be phased out by the industry in 2010, but the EPFL calculation shows that “for the next decade no regular user needs to be overly concerned about the security of 160-bit ECC.”
