One-Time Pad Encryption With No Pad?

thepooleboy writes: "The Globe and Mail has an article about a Toronto area company that has perfected 'Unbreakable Encryption' using the Vernam Cipher." The idea is to use as a one-time pad a large number generated by equations sent with an initial (proprietary) exchange which takes place when users connect to an equipped server. Since real one-time pads' numbers are by definition random and known in advance to both sender and receiver, though, the company seems to be playing fast-and-loose with their terms.

Comments

I think we've been here

[fm6]

equations sent with an initial (proprietary) exchange

Since the exchange software is closed source, how are we supposed to know if it's secure? It's probably some silly gimmick that will be broken by the first hacker who fiddles with it.

Attempts to get around the fundamental limits of data encryption (and data compression, and a lot of other software fundamentals) remind me of all the pointless efforts to build a Perpetual Motion Machine. "Yeah, the smart guys say energy is "conserved", but anybody with any common sense can see if you just tweak this gearbox this way..."

A vernam cipher IS unbreakable

[dwbryson]

no, a vernam cipher is the only form of unbreakable encryption. It happens like this: you have a stream of extremely random bits. And you have to make sure they are really really random, no pseudo random number generators. Say it's coming from a satelite up in space that measures radioactive particles(this was proposed in a paper not too long ago). Now the satellite streams these bits down to earth, so anybody can access them. Alice and Bob want to communicate securely over an insecure channel. So the agree on a series of bits to encrypt with. This can be anything from "every other bit" to a large polynomial function that says which bits to use. So every bit the function designates as an encrypted bit is used to XOR any message Alice and Bob use to communitacte. So, Alice computes bit random bit number x to encrypt bit y. She does XOR(x,y)->c and sends it to Bob. Bob also has this formula and performs the calculation to find which bit number x to use, then performs XOR(c,x)->y. The key is keeping the bit number function secret. Now, why is this secure? because anybody listening on the channel doesn't know the function(hopefully) and if your bits are truely random there is *no* way to distinguish whether any given bit can be 0 or 1. Try all the combinations for 0 or 1 in the message you want, but every permutation you want will look like the correct decryption.