As per the document published on December 20 by Nature, a scientific media outlet, the system utilizes jumbled wavepackets in traditional silicon based semiconductors.
The chip was designed by scientists from the UK based School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St. Andrews, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, and the Center for Unconventional Processes of Sciences in California.
The document elaborates that traditional encryption norms followed by cryptos may become outdated due to innovations in quantum computing technology.
It is generally believed that quantum computers would be able to obtrude conventional encryption in the near future. This is perceived as a threat to cryptos by think tanks.
Last month, Xinxin Fan, who lead cryptography division of IoTeX, a privay and IoT focused blockchain platform, stated that the crypto community should put efforts to resolve the threat as early as possible.
The platform visualized by the adademics is based on the plan of a one-time pad (OTP), developed and patented by engineer Gilbert Vernam a century before, after proposed in 1882. OTPs are popular because they cannot be broken, but necessitates exchanging single use keys.
In spite of the system’s security, OTPs are not implemented because of the lack of pragmatic and secure method of sharing the keys. Nevertheless, the chip built by the researchers’ attempts to implement OTP in a feasible way. The academics further state as follows:
“Develop a physical realization of the OTP that is compatible with the existing optical communication infrastructure and offers unconditional security in the key distribution.”
The chips utilize standard laws of physics such as chaos theory and second law of themodynamics. The keys that are utilized to decrypt the info are never saved or passed on with the message.
Back in October, author of “Mastering Bitcoin”, Andreas Antonopoulos stated that latest innovations in quantum computing by Google are not a case of worry for the Bitcoin (BTC) community.