Twitter using 'impossible to solve' mathematical problem to protect users from electronic snooping

Twitter has used an ‘impossible’ mathematical problem to protect its users from electronic snooping

The problem was first discovered by a British secret agency GCHQ

According to news.com.au, Twitter said that ‘perfect forward secrecy’ (PFS) was now live on all its services

The move is intended to make it more difficult for data to be collected on its users without going through legal channels

Jim Killock, director of the Open Rights Group (ORG), said it was a ‘policy move’ after revelations about mass surveillance by GCHQ and the American National Security Agency (NSA), the report said

In June it was revealed that GCHQ was using a project called Tempora to indiscriminately scoop data from fibre optic cables entering and leaving the UK, it added

The maths involved makes it almost impossible to calculate the private key from the public one

But if an attacker acquires a company’s private key it can read anything sent to and from that company’s servers

According to the report, the so-called “Diffie-Hellman” method used by Twitter was first discovered by GCHQ analysts in the early 70s

The method however remained classified until it was independently patented by a pair of American cryptographers.