Gearing Up: How to Eat Your Cryptocake and Still Have It (Transcript of Discussion)

Abstract

This talk has to do with big, or rather huge numbers of bits, and how it affects security. I’m going to start with the observation that shared keys are not always small. Very long keys can be shared using the so-called beacon method, which is well-known in various shapes and forms. The principle is always the same, you have a high rate source of random data, by random I mean as random as you can get. This is the single vulnerability point, the source of data, if you compromise it you compromise the whole system, but you can secure that physically, just don’t let Moriarty come anywhere near it, that’s all you need. The high rate data source creates and broadcasts an enormous amount of data, exabytes. Then there are customers of the system, Alice and Bob, maybe George as well, and Charlie. The method is not sensitive to how many customers there are.