Animated Encryption

An anonymous reader submits: "Cartoons for fun and secrecy -- A student at the University of Dayton has apparently come up with an encryption scheme using computer generated animation. Story at the Chronicle of Higher Education."

Comments

Not Using Animation to encrypt

[nairnr]

Maybe it is just me, but I think the poster is a little bit confused. It is not that animation is being used in encryption, but rather he was inspired by the crowd scene in Hunchback, where the characters movements were essential being controlled by random numbers to create a lively and chaotic look to it.

The article then states that the thought was to use random data in an encryption algorythm to make it unbreakable. So I don't think that we will be seeing messages passed around the the next Disney flick...

More Details - His Abstract

[Cryptosporidium]

This is a direct quote from his science fair project abstract:

The purpose of this project was to create unbreakable cryptography employing a random number generator for personal and business use on the Internet or for internal communications and data storage. A literature search found that currently used methods have computational security (DES, Public Key) and that only cryptography with "one-time pad" encryption and random keys has unconditional security. The hypothesis for this project was that unconditional cryptography is possible if the random number generator has perfect probability and is mathematically random. A wide range of random number generators (computer built-ins and from the literature) were tested for randomness, speed, range of seed numbers, simplicity, and period length. Randomness was tested for frequency patterns using the chi-square test method.

The best random number generator (from literature) was combined with a shift cipher to produce cryptography that is simple to implement, suitable for personal or networked computers, and has unconditional security. The method uses one time, random keys and modulus arithmetic to make the cipher one-way and unbreakable. Disks containing a large array coordinates of the seed used to generate the one-time, random key can be transmitted publicly. The developed cryptography would be suitable for personal use, business sensitive messages and data, and top-secret military communications.

Snake Oil

[Jerf]

Assuming this abstract is complete and correct, then it provides us enough information to know that his encryption technique is more snake oil.

Specifically, we have the unbreakable claim warning sign, and even more specifically, this is almost certainly one of the one -time pad errors:

The bits in the pad cannot be generated by an algorithm or cipher. They must be truly random, using a real random source such as specialized hardware, radioactive decay timings, etc. Some snake oil vendors will try to dance around this issue, and talk about functions they perform on the bit stream, things they do with the bit stream vs. the plaintext, or something similar. But this still doesn't change the fact that anything that doesn't use real random bits is not an OTP. The important part of an OTP is the source of the bits, not what one does with them.

There's also the technobabble, secret algorithms, and revolutionary breakthrough warning signs.

I hope they enjoy the $20,000 patent, 'cause it's not worth the paper it's printed on.