Security Notes: The Cyber Ocean And the Chemistry Beach

There are many ways to protect against a shark attack: certain wet suits, defensive tools, evasive behavior, and so on. Sometimes they help, other times they don’t. What never fails is to walk on the beach. Safety guaranteed.

Same for the cyber ocean. If you walk on its beach, known as the chemistry beach, no hackers will harm you. Indeed, the cyber ocean has been populated lately with artificial-intelligence sharks that are so much more harmful than yesterday’s sort.

AI technology can fake a remote presence so convincingly that all the sophisticated methods payments companies have been using to confirm identity are becoming useless before the emerging artificial-intelligence tool set. Vision, sound, behavior, even answers to personal questions—all can be imitated. Institutional accounts are being compromised. Individuals are fooled into sending money to a purported relative in distress.

One must admit that attack AI is a shark that threatens any swimmer in the cyber ocean. Analyzing this threat as an innovation challenge. A common cryptographic solution will not do. Cryptography is based on discrimination between a key holder and a non-key-holder. With AI, a fraudster convinces its target that it is the institution to which they must submit their key to be authenticated. The surrendered key is then used by the fraudster to steal its target’s identity. Unfortunately, this works also with biometric keys. Indeed, AI defeats every safety measure we resort to today.

It is time to apply the InnovationSP platform (https://InnovationSP.net) for deep conceptual innovation: (i) store the secret off the digital realm; and, (ii) replace a static key with a key-fountain that spews new random key bits each time it is used.

These two abstract principles are implemented by using a chunk of matter. The storied physicist Richard Feynman insightfully commented, “there is plenty of room at the bottom,” suggesting that the microcosmos is a huge container of data. Einstein’s famous formula may be loosely rewritten as I = MC2 , indicating that even a tiny piece of matter contains an enormous amount of information (I) written in a language called chemistry—which is not digital.

Two parties, Alice and Bob, holding duplicates of a material lump can cross-authenticate each other. Alice will randomly choose an attribute of the material lump they both have a duplicate of, measure it on her lump, and ask Bob to measure the same on his duplicate. If the measurements agree, Alice is satisfied that she is talking to the holder of her own material duplicate. That’s because both Alice and Bob read their data from a non-digital (non-hackable) source. They walk on the chemistry beach.

Modern nanotechnology enables us to write data in measurable attributes of a complex lump of matter. Preliminary steps have been developed by BitMint (U.S. patents 10,467,522;  11,062,279;  11,548, 309) to construct the “Rock of Randomness,” which yields an astronomic quantity of measurable attributes—a key fountain.

This solution will allow holders of duplicates of a material entity to cross identify one to the others. The same technology can be used to authenticate various material entities, putting counterfeiters out of business. “Chemistry beach technology” will allow central banks to print banknotes denominated in much higher values than $100, should it be deemed necessary. Chemistry wallets have been designed to pay and get paid digital money on contact, even when the Internet is down.

Cyberspace removed distance as a barrier to human interaction. Now AI threatens this advantage with its ability to use distance to steal identities. Enter the chemistry beach, re-establishing cyberspace as a nice place to live, work, and pay.

—Gideon Samid gideon@bitmint.com