[Cryptography] "On-chip random key generation done using carbon nanotubes"

Jerry Leichter leichter at lrw.com
Tue Feb 23 18:14:04 EST 2016


> Interesting... It is an on silicon one time pad that is not shared.
> It should be nonvolatile and if permitted by hardware it can be mapped.
> If it can be mapped  a second copy of a one time pad can be made to phone home 
> with.   A hard fuse link set could make it near impossible to map a second time
> thus making it an interesting mobile resource.
Not sure what you are talking about here.  This is not a one-time pad; it's a unique, random, unpredictable key, or ID, or whatever you want to make of it.  But it certainly wouldn't be used as a one-time pad.  The test chip they built had 64 bits on it - not really even enough for a decent key today.  While I can easily see them scaling up to, say, 256 bits or even a few Kb, they don't seem to be talking about millions or billions of bits.  And even if they were - we have plenty of ways of *generating* secure one-time pads today.  This would be a bizarre and complex technology to solve the easy part of the problem - the hard part, as always, being key distribution.

> Large is very possible.  

> Fragile?   If too fragile data gets lost when it should not be lost.
You might want to read the article on the sense in which the data is "fragile".

                                                        -- Jerry



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