One-Time Pad reinvented to make electronic copying impossible

Re:One-Time Pad reinvented to make electronic copying imposs... by rosser on Monday May 20, 2013 @09:52PM (#5741443)

This doesn't solve the key distribution problem at all:

To start off, both Alice and Bob must have their own slabs of diffusing glass and must physically meet to create a key for encoding a message later.

Like any other OTP system, key distribution — ensuring that the parties who wish to communicate securely have a shared secret (or secrets in the case of OTP; the whole point of OTP is that a key is only used once) — is the weak point. Unlike many other OTP systems, this one requires a physical meeting, which, depending on your use-case for needing crypto in the first place, may be impossible, or deadly dangerous.

At best, this complicates key compromise.

EDIT: clarifying language.

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Re:One-Time Pad reinvented to make electronic copying imposs... by _red on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @05:01AM (#5742545)

Correct, I can't see the practical use of this.

If Alice and Bob must have a secure method to jointly compute K(A) ⊕ K(B), then why wouldn't then use that same method to just exchange the data?

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Re:One-Time Pad reinvented to make electronic copying imposs... by dsr_ on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @05:44AM (#5742671)

At the time of their key-exchange meeting, they don't know what messages they will want to exchange later.

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