• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Scientists Develop ‘Absolutely Unbreakable’ Encryption Chip Using Chaos Theory

God Enel

Member
what if there were a method of enabling data to be sent using an "absolutely unbreakable" one-time communication technique? What if that technique could achieve perfect secrecy cryptography via correlated mixing of chaotic waves in an irreversible time-varying silicon chip? An international team of scientists claims that's exactly what it has done, developing a prototype silicon chip that uses the laws of nature, including chaos theory. With no software or code to manipulate, traditional methods of cracking computer encryption are irrelevant, the scientists claim. What's more, it is also claimed to overcome the threat of quantum computers and can do so using existing communication networks.

How does the chaos theory encryption chip work?
An international team of scientists from the School of Physics and Astronomy at University of St Andrews, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and the Center for Unconventional Processes of Sciences (CUP Sciences) has today published a paper to demonstrate perfect secrecy cryptography in classical optical channels.

"With the advent of more powerful and quantum computers, all current encryptions will be broken in a very short time," Dr. Andrea Fratalocchi, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at KAUST and leader of the study, said, "exposing the privacy of our present and, more importantly, past communications."


The prototype chip the scientists have developed uses the classical laws of physics, including chaos theory and the second law of thermodynamics, to achieve "perfect secrecy." The cryptographic keys generated by the chip, which are used to unlock each message, are never stored and are not communicated with the message. It exploits correlated chaotic wavepackets, mixed in inexpensive and CMOS compatible silicon chips. All of which start life as digital human fingerprint images that are transformed into a "chaotic microresonator." It is claimed that even facing an attacker with "unlimited" technological power, even if they could access the system and copy the chips, would be unable to break the encryption because it is protected by the second law of thermodynamics and the "exponential sensitivity of chaos."

"This system is the practical solution the cybersecurity sector has been waiting for since the perfect secrecy theoretical proof in 1917 by Gilbert Vernam," Dr. Al Cruz, founder of the Center for Unconventional Processes of Sciences (CUP Sciences) in California, and co-author of the study said.


Can any encryption technique be absolutely unbreakable?
Professor Andrea di Falco of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St. Andrews, another author of the study, said that "this new technique is absolutely unbreakable, as we rigorously demonstrated in our article." What's more, Professor di Falco said it could be used to "protect the confidentiality of communications exchanged by users separated by any distance, at an ultrafast speed close to the light limit and in inexpensive and electronic compatible optical chips." Which almost sounds too good to be true. So, does the claim that as the encryption and decryption are done using physical measurements of the properties of nature by the chip, not by wrapping the message in lines of ciphered code, there is no software or code to manipulate, stand up to scrutiny?


I reached out to Dr. Mark Carney, a security researcher and consultant with a particular interest in quantum attacks on classical crypto for his initial reactions to the paper. That's the caveat; these are only his initial observations. "The notion of 'unbreakable' assumes that the only things in play are the cryptosystem itself," Dr. Carney says. The quantum key distribution (QKD) system that is presented is "probably very secure by itself," he says, "but like the joke that ends 'spherical chickens in a vacuum' you have to pay attention to the context."

Dr. Carney suggests that you can have the most amazing QKD system using optical fiber to transmit photons for doing, say, BB84 (the canonical QKD algorithm from 1984.) However, if he were to cut that fiber, then a semi-permanent downgrade attack to classical cryptography has been achieved. "The key phrase in the paper is on page two," Dr. Carney says, "and that's 'properly implemented.' While admitting that the chaotic micro-resonator composed by a series of point scatterers made by reflective nanodisks described in the paper, "is some epic-level technological development from a physics standpoint." But, as Dr. Carney says, "if it's plugged into an XP machine, it's attack surface is very different."

Dr. Al Cruz agrees that it is true there is no such thing as uncrackable software but says, "what makes this method of cryptography so different from anything else out there is that the encryption is done using physical measurements of properties of nature, such as light." Because it is "all hardware and physics," Dr. Cruz says, "it would require advanced degrees in physics to even begin to understand what is happening inside this chip."

Again, Dr. Cruz reiterated that there is no code to manipulate, and the limited software is ROM based, so traditional methods of hacking encryption are irrelevant. "At the same time," he says, "the embedded math is based on axioms of the law of physics such as the second law of thermodynamics and chaos theory, so even if a malicious actor were to gain physical access to the chips, copy them or otherwise tinker with the components, it would prevent the encryption scheme from working, but would not reveal the key (which is never stored or shared anyway), nor would it provide any other avenue for cracking the code."


What next for this chaotic cryptography?
The devil will, as always, be in the detail. All that said, it's an interesting development and one that has the potential to revolutionize communications privacy if it can be proven to work at scale and a reasonable enough cost.

"We're obviously very excited to finally be able to talk about the work," Dr. Cruz says, "and now that we are out of the lab, the next phase is to engage with partners to help us explore the commercial possibilities." CUP Sciences is pioneering an entirely new field of hardware-based, software-embedded engineering of complexity (or chaos) based technologies addressing critical challenges of sustainable development. This is a part of that work. "CUP Sciences’ partner, PERA Complexity, will contribute with go to market strategy and commercialization," Dr. Cruz says, but "more partners will be necessary to bring this technology into the world." If that sounds like you, then please contact Dr. Cruz by email to ac.qm@cupsciences.net

A friend send me this article and I don’t know shit aboutall this stuff, what do you think about it? Is it really unbreakable as mentioned?

Chaos theory my password and prevent my ass from posting if old
please don’t 😭
 

God Enel

Member
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveyw...ryption-chip-using-chaos-theory/#4599abad15ba


Fascinating, thanks for posting. Sounds early and mostly unproven, but we do need to pursue cryptographic solutions that can hold up to quantum computing.

Oh yeah I forgot to post the source while copying all this shit. Thank you
I’m curious how long it’s going to take until you can buy the first pieces of hardware with this tech? I have a hard time imagining something being uncrackable?!

and what about all this quantum computer fuss? I’m see articles about it popping up for years but still nothing happened?
 
Last edited:

EviLore

Expansive Ellipses
Staff Member
Oh yeah I forgot to post the source while copying all this shit. Thank you
I’m curious how long it’s going to take until you can buy the first pieces of hardware with this tech? I have a hard time imagining something being uncrackable?!

and what about all this quantum computer fuss? I’m see articles about it popping up for years but still nothing happened?

Password manager for unique passwords per account and 2FA wherever feasible will sort you out for most scenarios. Cracking encryption via quantum computing isn’t a thing yet.
 

Gavin Stevens

Formerly 'o'dium'
8PQDe43.gif
 

Avasarala

Emoji Emperor
Oh yeah I forgot to post the source while copying all this shit. Thank you
I’m curious how long it’s going to take until you can buy the first pieces of hardware with this tech? I have a hard time imagining something being uncrackable?!

There are almost certainly those around here that know more about this than I do, but the simple answer is as follows:

Most encryption currently is considered secure enough to be treated unbreakable because the average amount of times one would need to figure a solution before stumbling upon the correct one is a very large number, as in: 'The thousand fastest computers working around the clock would have only a tiny fraction of a percent of a chance to solve the problem before the sun exploded. '

With the likelihood of success so small, there's no point in trying.

What quantum computers mean is a fundamental change in how the computer functions, resulting in a computer that would be many orders of magnitude more powerful than anything imaginable today. Basically rendering current encryption obsolete because it literally will be able to force-hack the scheme and try all the guesses fast enough to be useful.
 

eot

Banned
This is based on a very old scheme, called a one-time pad. The wiki article is decent actually. What this paper tackles is the generation and distribution of the one-time key. If such a key is random and securely distributed, then the OTP scheme is fully secure. The way they guarantee that the key is random is by generating it through a chaotic scattering process. Now, technically this is still just a pseudo-random number, so some assumptions have to enter at this point. They then propose to physically and irreversibly alter the physical medium in which the scattering takes place, such that it will be different each time a key is generated. Again, the 2nd law of thermodynamics is a statistical law, which means that it holds on average, so you need more assumptions (though to be fair, very reasonable ones).

Anyway, this scheme looks a bit like a classical version of quantum key distribution. So for example, you still need to authenticate the person you're communicate with, that's something the scheme doesn't account for. How do you know that you're not in fact establishing a secure key with an eavesdropper? Personally I think post-quantum crypto is more likely to be solved by new asymmetric crypto algorithms, than schemes that need dedicated hardware.
 
Last edited:

Gargus

Banned
It will be broken eventually.

If one man can create it and another can beat it. Nothing is impossible once we understand it. I mean obviously it isn't impossible to break the encryption because once it's encrypted it has to be able to be decrypted somewhere somehow by something. So the lock has a key and all it will take is for someone to learn how to create their own key or learn how they key is made.
 

eot

Banned
and what about all this quantum computer fuss? I’m see articles about it popping up for years but still nothing happened?
Turns out they're quite tricky to make, but we're also actually making quite good progress. One "problem" is that we have amazing computers nowadays, so we not only need to build a quantum computer, we need to make a pretty damn good one before it's useful for anything. Think about the evolution computers went through, from being the size of a room in the 40's, to fitting in your pocket today. That's one hell of a leap. Within the next 20 years you will probably see small scale quantum computers applied to quantum simulation problems, but large scale universal QCs capable of running Shor's algorithm for integer factorisation (and breaking encryption) are probably further away than that (barring unexpected huge breakthroughs). Scaling quantum computers is a lot harder than scaling classical ones (not true for all QC architectures, but most of them).


It will be broken eventually.

If one man can create it and another can beat it. Nothing is impossible once we understand it. I mean obviously it isn't impossible to break the encryption because once it's encrypted it has to be able to be decrypted somewhere somehow by something. So the lock has a key and all it will take is for someone to learn how to create their own key or learn how they key is made.
Unbreakable in this context means that you cannot guess the key, or equivalently that the encrypted message does not contain any information about the plaintext message. One way to think about it is that you can guess a key that gives you a valid looking message, but that message is completely random, and you have no way of telling if it's the original one or not.

Yes, of course if the message can be decrypted, and the decryption key is stored somewhere, then in principle the security is compromised. Secure cryptography refers to the secure distribution (and generation) of keys.
 
Top Bottom