Animated Encryption

An anonymous reader submits: "Cartoons for fun and secrecy -- A student at the University of Dayton has apparently come up with an encryption scheme using computer generated animation. Story at the Chronicle of Higher Education."

Pointless article.

[fogof]

This is such a pointless article. They give no insight on the technology. And one of the major points: The inventor is a teenager. Ok ... Maybe if they write about it in a couple of years when the patent passes it might not be a wast of time/bandwidth to read that article. There was no insight only saying saying that he used random numbers and cartoons. And oh yeah, they tried to sell it. If you are going to write about a tech, please .... please describe the technology, isn't that the point ?

unbreakable? right....

[KillerCow]

new, and potentially unbreakable, encryption technology

Unbreakable? Sounds like snake oil already...

An idea dawned on him for a unique way to use random numbers in a math equation to encrypt data.
"Since you don't know what any of the values are mathematically, [a hacker] can't solve it,"

This is ridiculous. Some stream ciphers use random number generators for their encryptions. The problem is, that since the "random" numbers come from a random number generation algorithm, they are not random -- they just appear to be. When they are subject to analysis, patterns are found, and the whole system is compromised. The security lies in how hard it is to predict the "random" numbers.

Jason Kauffman is going to continue plugging away at his mechanical-engineering degree.

That's a good idea, since this sounds like the junk "unbreakable" encryption that comes around every few years. If he's interested in encryption, he should take some advanced math classes to get a better foundation to work from. And pick up a copy of Applied Crytography.

Sorry about the rant... but this kind of thing gets me going.

Re:Scant on details (not new?)

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this really new? See Sherlock Holmes The Adventure of the Dancing [odysseytec.com]
Men

two words: SNAKE OIL

[Dr. Awktagon]

Yup, all the tell-tale signs are there:

• claims that it's potentially "unbreakable"
• hasn't spent much of his academic career breaking other people's cryptography
• uses the clout of his dad to get funding
• and of course, he's patenting it, which means it won't be of any use to anyone.

My guess is, he found some "smooth noise" generator and thought that it would make a good source of "random numbers", used, e.g., as a key schedule algorithm, and as soon as the patent is published (which it will be, thanks to the dumb patent office), it will be broken (it probably has a short "key" to set initial conditions, which will be easy to break) and this guy will be forgotten.

Though the cartoon connection is kinda cute and might get some press attention.

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