One-Time Pad From Caltech Offers Uncrackable Cryptography

zrbyte writes "One-time pads are the holy grail of cryptography — they are impossible to crack, even in principle. However, the ability to copy electronic code makes one-time pads vulnerable to hackers. Now engineers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, have found a way around this to create a system of cryptography that is invulnerable to electronic attack. Their solution is based on a special kind of one-time pad that generates a random key through the complexity of its physical structure, namely shining a light through a diffusive glass plate."

Comments

Moon Runes

[codemaster2b]

So, the message can only be read by the light of a moon the same shape and season that the message was written on?

Re:Impossible?

[Hans Adler]

Who would have thought that the f... article addresses this devilishly ingenious workaround?

"And even if Eve steals the glass, they estimate that it would take her at least 24 hours to extract any relevant information about its structure.

This extraction can only be done by passing light through the glass at a rate that is limited by the amount of heat this creates (since any heating changes the microstructure of the material). And the time this takes should give the owners enough time to realise what has happened and take the necessary mitigating actions."

Re:Not too long until an iceberg attack is reveale

[Sockatume]

That's not the case with a properly used one-time pad. Normally you break a cipher by finding correlations due to the repeated use of a finite encryption key on different parts of a comprehensible plaintext. If either the message is random, or the encryption key is random and nonrepeating, then the message cannot be deciphered.

Unless you steal the pad, or force the user to repeat it.

Re:Not too long until an iceberg attack is reveale

[Joce640k]

Nope. The OTP is truly unbreakable.

The only problem with it is that you need to secretly transmit the pad to the recipient. How do you do that? With a one-time-pad...?

Re:Impossible?

[rherbert]

What if you drop the glass plate? You're sure to crack it then.

Re:Not too long until an iceberg attack is reveale

[smallfries]

The real key here is that there is no advantage to the device at all.

In the cryptographic protocol that the authors (all physicists) believe to be novel, but which every cryptographer is aware of:
1. The authors have a perfectly secure channel (separate from the one established in the protocol).
2. They exchange as much information over that channel as the device stores.
3. The later established channel can only use that number of bits.

For real excitement they xor together their OTPs. Sorry guys but this is called a pre-shared key and the crypto world is quite aware of it. Good luck with the window dressing getting you past the PC of a physics venue.