In 2014, 783 data breaches were reported, with at least 85.61 million total records exposed, representing an increase of nearly 500% from 2005. That number more than doubled in three years to 1,579 reported breaches in 2017. How can we change this cycle and make our data more secure?
Christiana Chamon is a doctoral student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, working with Dr. Laszlo Kish on ways to keep sensitive information as secure as possible.
Chamon’s research project focuses on the Kirchhoff-Law-Johnson-Noise (KLJN) key exchange, which is the only unconditionally secure hardware that can be integrated on a chip to secure credit cards, computers and other instruments.
“KLJN is the classical physical competitor of quantum key distribution (QKD). KLJN and QKD both provide unconditional security, which means that the encryption cannot be cracked by a high-computational power such as a quantum computer or even by an infinitely fast computer,” Chamon said.
This directly affects industry in that classified projects can be kept confidential as well as email and other forms of electronic communications. To the everyday individual, this means social security numbers and other highly sensitive materials can be kept safe and secure from any potential threats.
The difference between the current key exchange systems that are used today and the KLJN key change system is that the communication systems we use today are only conditionally secure.
“The security in these systems is based on mathematically unproven assumptions that there are no more efficient cracking algorithms than the ones that are used today,” Chamon said.
With the current systems, it takes a long time for an eavesdropper to crack the encrypted data, but the access of that data is still a possibility. Chamon’s work with Kish on the KLJN system eliminates this as a possibility altogether.
“The biggest advantage of KLJN compared to QKD is that it can be integrated on a chip, which means that unconditional security can be expanded to communications within computers, instruments, military equipment and video games,” Chamon said. “Thus, even if the equipment gets into the hands of an adversary or pirates they still cannot follow the communication and access the secure data in it.”
Chamon first became interested in this subject after auditing Kish’s security course, where she began to see the applications of this work. This interest turned into a joint paper with Kish that will be submitted for publication at the end of the month.