The official Certified Ethical Hacking course material identifies three types of hackers:

Black Hats: criminal hackers

Grey Hats: hackers that find exploits because they want to (not for good or bad intentions)

White Hats: hired penetration testers

The media and many parts of the information security profession lumps all ‘hackers’ into one big box labeled “criminals”.  I used to think this way as well until I went to Defcon.  It was a real eye opener.  I saw hackers who want to do something good for the consumners.  I saw several government agencies attempting to hire the best and brightest hackers and of course, I saw hackers that may very well have been working on the darkside.  The point is that “hacking” itself is the just a technique to find, and exploit weakness in a given system.  It is not intrinsically evil.  Hacking is just a method, the intent of the user determines whether or not there is a adverse effect on individuals, organizations or a given society.

Contrary to popular conservative/traditional beliefs the world is not black and white.  There are cases in which hacking is legal.  Just take a look at these legal hacking cases:

Ethical Hacking.  Involves getting formal permission from the “target” prior to hacking.

Hackthissite.  Hack this site is one of many sites that allow users to freely hack their way in.  This is done for fun, for learning or just for the heck of it.  Typically, there are rules and guidelines that are create so that the user and the host can benefit from the learning experience. 

Reverse Engineering is Legal.  Cases of reverse engineering have been deemed as legal in the U.S. in many other industries.  The legalities for reverse engineering software are still being shaped by a new breed of cases. 

1999-2002: DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA) vs. Bunner, et al.  The DVD-CCA attempts to sue anyone distributing a descrambler software that was created by reverse engineering their product.  They even attempt to sue anyone linking to sites giving out the descrambler.  initial case 2 | eef involvement |  Bunner and other won the case  *note: there were not even the ones who reverse engineered the product

The attempt to Legalize Intrusions for Corporations.  In 2002, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif) tried to pass a law called the Peer to Peer Privacy Prevention Act (2002) which would have created section 514 of U.S.C 17 Chapt 5 allowing companies to legally hack into computers to find pirated software and intellectual property and use that information in a court of law against the assailant.  Article on Peer to Peer Prevention Act

 

The NIST has an page that talks about Quantum Key Distribution:

Quantum encryption systems use lasers to generate individual pulses of light called photons. Each photon is sent in one of two modes, either vertical/horizontal, or plus 45 degrees/minus 45 degrees. Within each mode, one orientation represents the digital value 0, and the other represents the digital value 1. To visualize how this works, imagine that each photon is a tiny envelope moving perpendicular to the ground (vertical=1), parallel to the ground (horizontal=0), tilted at 45 degrees to the right (plus 45 degrees =1) or tilted 45 degrees to the left (minus 45 degrees=0). NIST