Totally Random One Time Pads

liliafan writes "Scientists in Japan have come up with a way of harnessing a truly random datasource for generating one time encryption pads: Quasars. One time encryption pads are widely accepted as being the most secure form of encryption, but this new technology from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology makes the pads even more secure."

Comments

Actual advancement

[flooey]

The summary for this article is a little misleading. One time pads aren't new, and good sources of natural randomness aren't new either.

The interesting part of this article is the fact that quasars could be used as a natural source of randomness for one time pads, yet can be accessed by both parties simultaneously. The historical problem with one time pads (and the reason they're rarely used in practice) is that it's a huge pain to distibute sufficient random data to all parties involved in a communication. Being able to use a natural source of randomness that's available to everyone at once would be a major increase in the usability of one time pads.

How is this secure?

[Zadaz]

How does this increase security? It's not like quasars are private property. Anyone can look at 'em...

Re:not so sure about this

[kingkade]

The keyspace offered by a million quasars, 5000 possible frequencies, and an almost arbitrarily fine time sampling is pretty vast.

The point is how do you get those parameters to the other party secretly? This is the same problem as giving them a one-time pad generated any random way. I think the point is that you can get randomness but the previous problem will always exist.