Perfect secrecy cryptography via mixing of chaotic waves in irreversible time-varying silicon chips

A Di Falco,A Fratalocchi,A Cruz,V Mazzone

doi:10.1038/s41467-019-13740-y

Abstract

Protecting confidential data is a major worldwide challenge. Classical cryptography is fast and scalable, but is broken by quantum algorithms. Quantum cryptography is unclonable, but requires quantum installations that are more expensive, slower, and less scalable than classical optical networks. Here we show a perfect secrecy cryptography in classical optical channels. The system exploits correlated chaotic wavepackets, which are mixed in inexpensive and CMOS compatible silicon chips. The chips can generate 0.1 Tbit of different keys for every mm of length of the input channel, and require the transmission of an amount of data that can be as small as 1/1000 of the message’s length. We discuss the security of this protocol for an attacker with unlimited technological power, and who can access the system copying any of its part, including the chips. The second law of thermodynamics and the exponential sensitivity of chaos unconditionally protect this scheme against any possible attack.

Highlights

Protecting confidential data is a major worldwide challenge
Conventional cryptographic schemes based on data encryption standard (DES), advanced encryption standard (AES), and Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman (RSA) encode messages with public and private keys of short length
We considered different communications scenario, in which Alice and Bob measure correlated spectra with different statistical fluctuations, and developed a multi-bit adaptive high boost (AHB) transform, which optimizes the extraction of information from acquired users spectra

Summary

Introduction

Protecting confidential data is a major worldwide challenge. Classical cryptography is fast and scalable, but is broken by quantum algorithms. As the system is classical, Eve can store all the signals launched by Alice and Bob and she can attempt a search on each user’s chip for the input conditions that generated the states she measured.

Results

Conclusion