SlashNOT

Squid writes: A scientist at MIT claims he has developed the world’s first completely unbreakable encryption method. According to his paper, “while a long enough one-time pad provides good encryption, it can still be decrypted by anyone with a copy of the pad. This system eliminates that last vulnerability.” The new system uses a random number generator, and instead of transmitting encoded data, it transmits the random numbers themselves. The resulting message cannot be decrypted by anyone, including the recipient.

Reaction to this development has been swift, with the US government restricting export of the encryption scheme and the usual crowd trying to fit the algorithm onto a T-shirt. Meanwhile, Microsoft is claiming that the algorithm violates their software patent for a feature already included in Microsoft Word.