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posted by Fnord666 on Monday June 08 2020, @11:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the ubreakable? dept.

Patterned Optical Chips That Emit Chaotic Light Waves Keep Secrets Perfectly Safe:

The one-time pad has proven absolutely unbreakable. Its secrecy rests on a random, single-use private key that must be shared ahead of time between users. However, this key, which needs to be at least as long as the original message, remains difficult to produce randomly and to send securely.

Fratalocchi's team has developed an approach to implement this encryption technique in existing classical optical networks using patterned silicon chips. The researchers patterned the chips with fingerprints to obtain fully chaotic scatterers that cause mixed light waves to travel in a random fashion through these networks. Any modification, even infinitesimal, of the chips generates a scattering structure that is completely uncorrelated to and different from any previous one. Therefore, each user can permanently change these structures after each communication, preventing an attacker from replicating the chips and accessing the exchanged information.

Moreover, these scatterers are in thermodynamic equilibrium with their environment. Consequently, an ideal attacker with an unlimited technological power and abilities to control the communication channel and access the system before or after the communication cannot copy any part of the system without reproducing the surroundings of the chips at the time of the communication.

"Our new scheme is completely unbreakable regardless of the time or the resources available, today or tomorrow," Mazzone says.

Journal Reference: A. Di Falco, V. Mazzone, A. Cruz and A. Fratalocchi, Perfect secrecy cryptography via mixing of chaotic waves in irreversible time-varying silicon chips Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-13740-y


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @12:07PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @12:07PM (#1004798)

    Isn't the idea to meet face-2-face once, exchange a bunch of one-time-pads, and then use the pads one at a time in the future?

    I suppose once face transplants come out of the lab, then f2f won't even be reliable anymore, but until then this seems like the way all good paranoids should encrypt.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 08 2020, @02:04PM (3 children)

    Not necessarily. The OTP could be in plain view as long as nobody except the intended party knew it was the OTP. Like, say, the last family picture or dank meme image file you posted somewhere (that would not be doing any recompression or resizing) before sending the message. Or the data pointed to by the last torrent you uploaded to some specific torrent site if you needed to transfer a large file. Double up with some PKE before you apply the OTP if you like.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 08 2020, @02:17PM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday June 08 2020, @02:17PM (#1004820)

      Steganographers have put a lot of theoretical work into the survival of image information through compression and resizing of images. You definitely lose information capacity, but there is (clearly) some information salvageable even after a shrink or compress-decompress cycle.

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      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 08 2020, @03:24PM (1 child)

        True but if you're using said information as a OTP page, you're going to need multiple images to get a respectable sized key out of.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 08 2020, @03:38PM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday June 08 2020, @03:38PM (#1004854)

          That's what they're working on - maximizing the survivable information.

          Out in the real world, the bottom 25% of a .png image is just about fair game as far as "hidden encoding" goes - most LCD monitors only show the 6 MSb of RGB information. If you're using the image as an OTP, you can use it all - and just put a tiny amount of meta-data in the hidden space (such low encoding density makes it virtually undetectable...) said metadata to include things like checksums to ensure that you've got the right image, pointers so you can find the next OTP image, etc.

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