Security Notes: The New Age of Security

Technology shifts responsibilities to us, the people. Not long ago we called a travel agent to book a flight. We stood in line at the bank, to get the teller to move some funds. Today more of us store money in a phone, and rely on reputable ciphers to do what banks used to do just yesterday.

The ciphers that underlie cyberfinance are few and vouched for by a small cadre of elite mathematicians, most of them serving commercial and government interests. Edward Snowden revealed a few years ago that the U.S. government secretly cracked ciphers they declared ‘\”safe” and “uncracked.” It is a daunting reality: Every smart cipher surrenders to a smarter mathematician. AES, RSA, and Elliptic Curves are no exception.

These algorithms are in the clear. And, in theory we can change and tweak them as we please. But we don’t do it because we are not cryptographers. And so they serve as stationary targets for their attackers.

It is quite exciting, then, to observe a fundamental alternative for projecting security. We may soon do away with the intimidating mathematical complexity of today’s ciphers, and replace it with a flow of randomness. It is similar to what Elon Musk did for the automotive industry. He switched its source of power from petroleum to batteries. This is why I like to call this emerging cyber innovation “Tesla Cryptography” (Google it).

Fountains of randomness are cheap and easy. They may be low grade (algorithmic), they may be high grade (physical, e.g.. U.S. patent 11,394,530), or even quantum grade—perfect. The projected security is directly proportional to the amount of randomness used. Soon enough, we, the message transmitters, the payors, and the payees, will decide how much randomness to pump in, to achieve our desired security.

The case is like riding a train with no control over its speed. With Tesla Cryptography, we drive our own car, and our own foot is on the gas pedal. The more randomness we use, the “messier” the operation, but it would be our choice how much inconvenience to put up with in order to project our desired security. More security for larger sums, more convenience for smaller sums.

Come to think of it, all this is a remarkable shift of responsibility from an obscure mathematician to the de facto stakeholder, to the person who would be harmed if the security is breached. And, in its fold, this shift hides an even more explosive promise: a level playing field. Today, governments and big corporations run the cryptography show, and we are in their hands. But randomness-powered cryptography allows each of us to pump in sufficient randomness to ensure that no one, however smart and well-equipped, can break our communication.

Cryptanalysis is pattern-busting, alas. Randomness is patternless and hence immunized against cyber attacks. Unassailable communication security is a very positive and a welcome reality for the most part, but not always.

Payments cyber-insecurity will be a thing of the past.  Cryptographic vaults will be more reliable than anything banks can promise us. As high-quality randomness becomes increasingly accessible, funds will be increasingly trusted to personal computing devices, less to bank accounts. Payments (and influence) will flow unimpeded across geographic and geo-political barriers. Traditional financial institutions, beginning with central banks, will all transform and adjust.

Digital money will be catapulted to heights and distances so far that our imagination will fail to even come close to what is coming down the pike. Much as Alexander Graham Bell had not a clue how far this little thing he called a telephone would go.

—Gideon Samid gideon@bitmint.com