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upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Better security achieved with randomly generating biological encryption keys

"Currently, encryption is done with mathematical algorithms that are called one-way functions," said Saptarshi Das, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics, Penn State. "These are easy to create in one direction, but very difficult to do in the opposite direction."

An example of this is multiplying two prime numbers. Assuming the original numbers are very large, reverse engineering from the result becomes very time and computer-resource heavy.

"However, now that computers are becoming more powerful and quantum computing is on the horizon, using encryption that relies on its effectiveness because it is monumentally time consuming to decrypt won't fly anymore," Das said.

[...] The researchers are currently using 2,000 T cells per encryption key. The team reports in a recent issue of Advanced Theory and Simulations that even if someone knows the key generation mechanism, including cell type, cell density, key generation rate and key sampling instance, it is impossible for anyone to breach the system. It is simply not possible from that information to bust the encryption.

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