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
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday June 08 2020, @11:48AM (10 children)
To securely send a message, first you must securely send a message ... key.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @12:07PM (4 children)
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.
(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)
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.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(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
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.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Monday June 08 2020, @12:15PM (4 children)
The idea is that there are times when you can securely send a message the conventional way (usually when you meet face-to-face, so you can see who receives the message), but those times are not necessarily the times when you need to send a secret message. Therefore you send a secret key at the time when it is possible, for use at a time when you need it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @12:22PM (3 children)
Waaah, what do you mean I have to plan ahead? You tech dorks make everything too technical! No wonder you never get laid. Why can't you losers just do your damn jobs now and then and make it easy to use?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @05:47PM (2 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software) [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @09:05PM (1 child)
Ok, I installed it, so that means only you can read this message, right? Let me post my password to be sure: hunter2.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @09:56PM
i can only see *******. your password is safe!
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday June 08 2020, @01:17PM (3 children)
Each person that knows a secret is also a point of vulnerability, and always will be.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday June 08 2020, @01:53PM
Yup. You'd really need to manipulate the market on large wrenches and drive the price up as well.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday June 08 2020, @02:59PM
Only if that person knows that it knows the secret.
Interrogator to captured person: "When will the attack be?"
Captured messenger, truthfully: "I have no idea!"
No amount of torture will change that.
Intended receiver: "Did Tom talk with you about his last holiday before the war?"
Messenger: "Yes, he told me that he was at Mallorca the year before. Must have been a great time, from what he told."
Intended receiver: "He told you how long he stayed, right?"
Messenger: "Indeed, he said that he stayed ten full days, and on the last day he left late in the evening."
Intended receiver to commander: "OK, we now have the time. The attack is at ten in the evening."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @02:38PM
I've never heard a better rationale for murder. [goodreads.com]
Kill! Kill! Kill!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 08 2020, @02:12PM (3 children)
Any completely unbreakable scheme is vulnerable to magic.
Any technology sufficiently advanced will appear as magic.
One thing we have repeatedly demonstrated in the past century is the advancement of technology in ways unanticipated.
From my 5 second scan of the summary, it seems like they think they've got a one-time pad, that's the information theory of it. When the chaos underlying their one-time pad is fully understood and predictable, it will be broken.
Bi-directional time travel would appear to be impossible, when that is proven incorrect there will be no more secrets.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2020, @08:44PM
The unbreakable scheme of TOMORROW - - - TODAY!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @12:51AM (1 child)
There. FTFY.
Time travel into the future is happening as I type. I'm traveling into the future at ~1 second/second as measured in my reference frame.
What's more, time travel into the past is theoretically possible [wikipedia.org], but is (currently) far beyond our scientific and technological capabilities. But it is possible, with some restrictions.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 09 2020, @11:38AM
That time-travel link was amusing, especially its mention of "classical quantum gravity". "classical" and "quantum" were once opposites!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09 2020, @09:25AM
Sure, it all goes well until your gods die and you don't know the combination of their safe.
BEHOLD! A GOD THAT BLEEDS!
I......... AM............ KIROK!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 09 2020, @11:44AM
So, they introduce randomness with a fingerprint. How, then are they going to reproduce the key at the destination? mail the silicon chip to the destination? But you need the chip when you send the message, so you can't send the chip ahead of time. And the whole point of the "thermodynamical equilibrium" is that you can't copy the chip. So this would seem to be nothing but a truly random number generator, which is something we already have. Key distribution is still a problem.
-- hendrik