Cryptography’s purpose is, obviously, 100% safe data. And data security is critical to the health of any modern business, governmental branch, and individual. It goes beyond individual institutions, though — data security is so important it can affect nation states and global stability.
But we’re in an era when cybersecurity breaches are frequent and existing cryptography solutions are no longer sufficient. What can be done?
A leading data security solution is One Time Pad (OTP).
Higher Data Security with the Best of the Best — the One Time Pad
Originally described in 1882 by California banker Frank Miller, One Time Pad was re-invented in 1917 by Gilbert Vernam and Joseph Mauborgne. It’s considered to be the one truly unbreakable encryption technique that endures to this day. Where other traditional forms of cryptography are vulnerable to advances in mathematics, increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, and quantum computing threats, OTP remains durable and consistent, secure against computer advances — even quantum computing. OTP is said to possess the most sought after property in cryptography — perfect secrecy.
The perfect secrecy of the One Time Pad relies on the proper execution of 4 ironclad rules — aka critical attributes. Each additional attribute creates an exponentially greater number of possible combinations, and that is what makes One Time Pad encryption nearly impossible to break, even with infinite computational power.
The 4 critical attributes of One Time Pad encryption are:
- Randomness – the OTP key must be truly random, with no discernible repeating patterns.
- Size – the OTP key must be at least as long as the original text it is protecting. (It needs to have at least as many letters or symbols as the data it’s securing.)
- Uniqueness – the OTP key must never be reused, not even a part of it — it is only to be used one time, as the name would suggest, to encrypt one item of data.
- Secret – the OTP key must be kept completely secret — keys must be securely shared between the sender and receiver only.
However, as you might imagine, the use of OTP in the modern digital era is not without challenges:
- OTP requires perfectly random numbers, which are difficult to generate. In fact, most “random number generators” today are imperfect, with patterns hidden below the surface.
- The generation of OTP keys as big as the files they’re protecting means twice the volume of data, posing scalability challenges.
- Secure exchange of big OTP keys is risky across any network (all are vulnerable to breaches), and if keys are not disposed of correctly, they may be reused in whole or part.
For these reasons, perfect secrecy has been widely accepted as being impractical to implement at the enterprise level, and modern cryptography has instead survived with an acceptable level of “computational security,” however imperfect and vulnerable.
But settling for mediocre data security is no longer acceptable.
Fortunately, emerging technologies are proving that it is possible to leverage the perfect secrecy of OTP for use at enterprise scale by solving for its inherent practicality issues.
These revolutionary cryptographic technologies offer 3 important ways to increase data security using One Time Pad encryption:
- The generation of secret, irrational, higher entropy random numbers that cannot be factored, with no embedded, repeating patterns.
- A reduction in OTP key storage size, enabling key delivery at a fraction of the usual data requirements.
- A new method of key distribution and management that ensures truly secure OTP key delivery — an easier feat when solving for the challenge of having to transmit impractically large-size OTP keys.
One Time Pad encryption is the gold standard of cryptography. And now, finally, a commercially viable One Time Pad has arrived.
One Time Pad Encryption — A Revolutionary, Scalable Solution
One Time Pad encryption is now available at enterprise scale thanks to Theon Technology. Theon is a game-changing software solution with a road map that is setting new standards for establishing highly scalable random number generation and delivers, for the first time, a commercially viable One Time Pad.
Theon’s TheonEncrypt™ provides an innovative way to reduce the OTP key storage and transmission overhead making it practical for deployment across multiple use cases.
We solve the age-old problem of the massive key size inherent with traditional OTP through our unique Random Number Generator (TheonRNG™) and geometric math algorithms which drive the creation of pattern-less, non-repeating secret keys.
TheonEncrypt’s unique approach finally enables commercial viability of OTP encryption for both data at-rest and in-flight. And, because Theon is a software approach, it drives flexibility across deployment models for a wide range of solutions in almost every industry and use case.
Discover the next-generation cryptography solution, with Theon Technology.
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Experience the perfect secrecy of true One Time Pad encryption — Reach out to a Theon expert today to find out how you can use OTP for a meaningful increase in data security for your organization. We also have free eBooks available for download, including our OTP primer, OTP for the Digital Enterprise.