As conventional cryptography become increasingly vulnerable to more sophisticated hacking methods, advances in higher maths, and the impending quantum computing era, the quest for new encryption solutions intensifies.
The One Time Pad (OTP) is the most secure, only known perfect cipher, but despite its formidable data security capabilities, it has frequently been discounted when it comes to enterprise adoption due to large key size requirements that make storage and transmission impractical.
But now, there is a breakthrough way to reduce OTP key storage and transmission overhead, making the One Time Pad deployable economically and at scale for the first time.
Mitigating the One Time Pad Scalability Problem
In the digital era, the security of our data relies on effective cryptography, and the most formidable, high-quality cryptography that has ever existed comes from the One Time Pad. This Holy Grail of secret-keeping techniques may have roots going back hundreds of years, but it still represents the gold standard in cryptographic methods.
Proven to be unbreakable by the father of modern information theory, Claude Shannon, OTP leverages a single-use unique key in combination with a reversible algorithm to encrypt data, with the process running backwards for decryption. OTP is invulnerable to the threat quantum computing poses to today’s more widely used cryptographic standards — when data is encrypted with a unique, high-entropy OTP key, it is utterly uncrackable by brute force.
Where OTP becomes impractical for enterprise adoption is in its biggest obstacle: the requirement that the OTP key be of equal size to the data it’s protecting.
The larger the data file, the larger the key — and with potentially millions of giant sensitive data files in need of securing within an enterprise, this fundamental flaw makes OTP challenging to implement at scale.
Transmission of those large data files along with equally large keys is unwieldy, with the additional storage space and processing power required quickly becoming unreasonable.
What’s more, digital information is exponentially increasing in volume all the time; as data files grow larger and more complex, the computational challenge to create keys equal in size grows in turn.
The extra effort and cost involved for deployment of traditional OTP makes it an unworkable encryption solution for enterprises — which is why businesses have been willing to settle for the “sufficient” data security provided by today’s standard cryptographic methods, despite susceptibility to current and future threats.
The good news is, settling no longer needs to be the only viable data security option.
There is a new way to leverage the natural advantages of OTP to protect against today’s ever-more malevolent deciphering and future quantum attacks, while simultaneously mitigating OTP’s historical drawbacks.
In a new approach to OTP key generation, an advanced mathematical equation is employed to create truly random keys, with one unique key issued for each item of data.
A pair of shared short secrets (relatively small parcels of data) is used at each end of the transaction to generate identical OTP keys independently. This shared secret is in effect the key to the key, rather than the OTP key itself. A secure key exchange method ensures the OTP short secrets are well-protected. The full OTP key is then reconstituted using the data by authorized parties at both ends of the transaction.
Thus, rather than storing and transmitting the entire large size OTP key, it’s the short shared secret, the key to the key, that makes this OTP method viable for commercial use.
To make implementation even more convenient, this software-based OTP solution doesn’t require an overhaul of security infrastructure — it can easily be layered over existing deployments.
In a computing environment where the nature of the evolving quantum threat landscape is precarious, enterprises now have the opportunity to consider a next-generation encryption approach based on the only “perfect” cipher — an approach that offers unbeatable security against incoming uncertainty.
A Revolutionary One Time Pad Solution
The gold standard in encryption techniques is now commercially viable for the first time.
Theon Technology has innovated a breakthrough key creation and storage solution that solves for OTP’s biggest obstacle: unwieldy key size. With TheonRNG™, Theon’s approach to OTP key generation, very large OTP keys need not be transmitted from one locale to another, but are rather provided within a symmetric solution — using private keys instead of public ones — that leverages proprietary software.
Theon’s innovative random number generator, TheonRNG™, in combination with geometric math algorithms drive the creation of patternless, non-repeating secret keys, the foundation of true security.
TheonRNG™ and TheonEncrypt™ work together to deliver a game-changing solution to the data security crisis: software-based generation of high-entropy, quantum-resistant private keys, performing with speed and economy — and at scale.
Theon Technology is setting a new standard for software-based cryptography, quantum-proof encryption and perfect secrecy for businesses.
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Take the first step on the road to perfect secrecy — Contact a Theon expert today to start taking advantage of scalable One Time Pad encryption for your enterprise. We also have free eBooks available for download, including our OTP primer, Adapting OTP for the Enterprise.