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