A new uncrackable security system created by researchers at KAUST, the University of St Andrews and the Center for Unconventional Processes of Sciences (CUP Sciences) is set to revolutionize communications privacy.

The international team of scientists created optical chips that enable information to be sent from user to user using a one-time unhackable communication that achieves "perfect secrecy," allowing confidential data to be protected more securely than ever before on public classical communication channels.

Their proposed system uses silicon chips that contain complex structures that are irreversibly changed to send information in a one-time key that can never be recreated or intercepted by an attacker.

The results, which were published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, open a new pathway towards implementing "perfect secrecy" cryptography at the global scale with contained costs.

"This new technique is absolutely unbreakable, as we rigorously demonstrated in our article. It can be used to protect the confidentiality of communications exchanged by users separated by any distance at an ultrafast speed close to the light limit and in inexpensive and electronic compatible optical chips," says Professor Andrea di Falco of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St. Andrews and first author of the study.

Current standard cryptographic techniques allow information to be sent quickly but can be broken by future computers and quantum algorithms. The research team says their new method for encrypting data is unbreakable and uses the existing communication networks, taking up less space on the networks than traditional encrypted communications.

Andrea Fratalocchi, associate professor of electrical engineering at KAUST and leader of the study. File photo.

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