A team of researchers claims that the prototype silicon fleck that they developed enables encryption that is incommunicable to interruption. According to an article published on Dec. twenty by scientific newspaper publication outlet Nature, the system uses cluttered wavepackets in conventional Silicon-based semiconductors.

The scrap was developed by scientists from the U.Thousand.-based Schoolhouse of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St. Andrews, Male monarch Abdullah University of Science and Engineering science in Saudi Arabia, and the Heart for Anarchistic Processes of Sciences in California.

The paper explains that conventional encryption standards — that cryptocurrencies rely on — could soon get obsolete due to developments in quantum computing.

It is widely believed that quantum computers would be able to suspension traditional encryption algorithms in a short period of time. This is seen by many as a major threat to cryptocurrencies.

In Nov Xinxin Fan, caput of cryptography at privacy and IoT-focused blockchain platform IoTeX, said that the crypto community should piece of work to address this threat immediately.

A new take on an former solution

The system envisioned by the researchers is based on the idea of a one-fourth dimension pad (OTP), patented past engineer Gilbert Vernam in 1919 after being conceived in 1882. OTPs are famous because they cannot exist cracked, just require sharing ane-time use keys the same size or longer than the information existence sent before information technology is sent.

Despite the system'southward security, OTPs are not adopted considering of the absence of a applied and safe way to commutation the keys. Withal, the fleck developed past the researchers tries to brand a practical OTP implementation, who merits to:

"Develop a physical realization of the OTP that is compatible with the existing optical communication infrastructure and offers unconditional security in the key distribution."

The fries utilise traditional physics and the classical laws of physics, including anarchy theory and the second law of thermodynamics. The keys that are used to decrypt the data are never stored or communicated with the message.

Equally Cointelegraph reported in October, writer of "Mastering Bitcoin" Andreas Antonopoulos said that recent advances in quantum calculating on Google'due south part are non an immediate concern for the Bitcoin (BTC) community.