Totally Secure Non-Quantum Communications?

An anonymous reader writes "TEES is reporting that Dr Laszlo Kish, an associate professor at Texas A&M, has proposed a 'classical, not quantum, encryption scheme that relies on classical physical properties -- current and voltage. He said his scheme is absolutely secure, fast, robust, inexpensive and maintenance-free and relies on simultaneous encrypting of information by both the sender and the receiver.' The scheme uses properties similar to Johnson noise along with Kirchoff's Law to provide what he hopes to be an easier method of secure communications. Arxiv also has the full text [PDF Warning] of the paper."

Comments

A lesson for venture capital

[Dster76]

From TFA:

Kish said that the dogma so far has been that only quantum communication can be absolutely secure and that about $1 billion is spent annually on quantum communication research.

I guess the quantum bubble is about to burst.

Re:A lesson for venture capital

[LoveShack]

I guess the quantum bubble is about to burst.

Well, it both is and isn't.

Interesting....

[DigitalReality]

I'm shocked.

Re:Interesting....

[ichigo 2.0]

Currently it would seem there is some resistance to your pun.

Implementation

[GigsVT]

This sounds very good in theory, but it may be difficult to implement securely.

For example, he claims an eavesdropper could inject current to measure voltage drops, but would be discovered on the first attempt. If the eavesdropped can send a pulse of current that is so small as to not be registered on the endpoint equipment (which say samples the line at 1X sampling rate), but the attacker is injecting and sampling at a rate 100X faster, the attacker's pulse will be so far above the nyquist bandwidth of the endpoints that they will never see it.

I admit I only read the abstract, he may address this later on in the paper.

Re:Outdated and irrelevant

[osu-neko]

Eh? Much like quantum communication systems, this is aimed at providing secure point-to-point communications. Almost everything you said above is utterly irrelevant to the question at hand. It doesn't solve any of the problems you bring up because it isn't meant to. Moving to hydrogen powered cars doesn't solve problems of secure Internet communcations, either. That doesn't make them a step backwards...