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New Polymer Ideal For Secure Data Storage
aphexbrett writes "Clever geometry is the basis of a new material that is said to be ideal for secure data encryption and dense optical information storage. The material consists of a lattice of onionlike spheres in which the particle core and its layers each contain a different dye. The material can hold four or more pieces of information in one spot--not just two as in binary optical data storage. And it opens a door to high-density three-dimensional optical data storage. Read a summary of the research over at C&EN News."
Somebody wake me when there's a new data storage more cost effective than a traditional hard disk, because that's what 99% of us care about for mass storage.
*ZZZZZZZZzzzzZZzzzzzzZ*
Yet Another Organic Storage Device..
As you may have noted, organic electronics and related topics are currently very hip. The problem is that these materials are very very instable. Great opportunity for secondary results, when your first hand research does not succeed. Just find some device the shows a somewhat reproducable instability and declare it as memory device.
Most of the published devices have endurances (write-read cycles) in the one or two digit order. Their data retention is measured in minutes. Reading/writing is so slow that you would need really really massive parallelism to get on par with HD, CD or flash. It could not be any further from a real application.
There is a difference between new research, something that can be practically implemented, and something that's ready for mass-market production. This is obviously not in the third category, but that doesn't make it uninteresting.
The venturi effect was discovered hundreds of years before the Wright Flyer was built, and it was 20 or 30 years after that before airplanes were useful for much. That doesn't mean the discovery and prototype (or specialized applications) were of no interest until commercial airliners appeared.
If you only care about deployable mass-market products, I suppose that's fine, but it's not worth posting about. If you can't tell the difference, or choose to ignore it, that's just obnoxious.
As far as I can tell, the connection to "secure data storage" is fairly tenuous. Or at least, they don't mean what computer security people would expect by that phrase.
C&EN's summary says that such material could be used to make ID cards which show different images (data) under different light, and that this "would be nearly impossible to fake." As far as I can tell, what this means is that a card made with this material is easily distinguishable from one that isn't. This only makes faking hard if forgers aren't able to make the material themselves. There wasn't anything in the article specifically saying why that would be the case, but it's easy to imagine that needing esoteric equipment would raise the bar a bit.
Having only read the C&EN blurb, I can't confidently say that there isn't some more direct security connection that wasn't mentioned. But no obvious candidates are coming to mind. You could store various watermarks and signatures and whatnot, but you can do that with existsing systems too.