Physical-layer encryption on the public internet: a stochastic approach to the Kish-Sethuraman cipher
This addresses the challenge of secure communication for users on the public internet, offering a classical alternative to quantum methods, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing stochastic concepts.
The authors tackled the problem of achieving information-theoretically secure communication over the public internet by leveraging the randomness in transit times, demonstrating a method for secure communication without relying on quantum key distribution.
While information-theoretic security is often associated with the one-time pad and quantum key distribution, noisy transport media leave room for classical techniques and even covert operation. Transit times across the public internet exhibit a degree of randomness, and cannot be determined noiselessly by an eavesdropper. We demonstrate the use of these measurements for information-theoretically secure communication over the public internet.