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

Scant on details

[SpatchMonkey]

The article was a bit scant on details. As we've seen before, if you keep your encryption scheme unpunlished and just claim that it is 'unbreakable', usually someone comes along later when it is in use and breaks it for you.

Actually it sounds quite similar to the 'teenage genius' story of that Irish schoolgirl who had her similarly 'unbreakable' matrix encryption scheme widely publicized without peer review, and then broken.

It'll be interesting to see what happens in this case ..

Unbreakable encryption?

[BlueWonder]

An unlikely combination of interests -- cartoons and math -- has inspired a sophomore at the University of Dayton to develop a new, and potentially unbreakable, encryption technology.

There already is an unbreakable encryption: the One-Time Pad. Furthermore, it is mathematically provable that no unbreakable encryption can have a shorter key than the One-Time Pad. Since the One-Time Pad algorithm is already extremely simple and fast (XORing the key with the plaintext), I don't see a need for any other unbreakable encryption.

unimpressive

[frovingslosh]

Too many times someone without a good background in this area thinks they have done something impressive, when they have really left wide open holes. Clearly we are not being given enough information here to prove this is the case, but the important thing is that we are not being given enough information to evaluate it either way. The article makes some vague claims but they are pretty lame:

"Since you don't know what any of the values are mathematically, [a hacker] can't solve it," says Robert E. Kauffman, who is a senior research chemist at Dayton and Jason Kauffman's father. Robert Kauffman formed a partnership with his son and the university to patent the idea. The Kauffmans are reluctant to go into more detail about the idea because it's in the patenting process.

Cryptography based on a hacker "not knowing" something can be in for quite a surprise. And there is not even a hint here that this technique is based on a mathematically sound formula that is "hard" to solve. Perhaps this guy is on to something, but this attempt to talk about it but at the same time claim they can't talk about it yet leads me to believe this is more of an exercise in hype or ego than anything scientific. Cartoon cryptography might turn out to be a fitting term for it.