In October 2017, tech giant Yahoo! disclosed a data breach that had leaked sensitive information of over 3 billion user accounts, exposing them to identity theft. The company had to force all affected users to change passwords and re-encrypt their credentials. In recent years, there have been several instances of such security breaches that have left users vulnerable.
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“Almost everything we do on the internet is encrypted for security. The strength of this encryption depends on the quality of random number generation,” says Nithin Abraham, a PhD student at the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering (ECE), Indian Institute of Science (IISc). Abraham is a part of a team led by Kausik Majumdar, Associate Professor at ECE, which has developed a record-breaking true random number generator (TRNG), which can improve data encryption and provide better security for sensitive digital data such as credit card details, passwords and other personal information. The study describing this device has been published in the journal ACS Nano.
Encrypted information can be decoded only by authorised users who have access to a cryptographic “key”. But the key needs to be unpredictable and, therefore, randomly generated to resist hacking. Cryptographic keys are typically generated in computers using pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs), which rely on mathematical formulae or pre-programmed tables to produce numbers that appear random but are not. In contrast, a TRNG extracts random numbers from inherently random physical processes, making it more secure.
In IISc’s breakthrough TRNG device, random numbers are generated using the random motion of electrons. It consists of an artificial electron trap constructed by stacking atomically-thin layers of materials like black phosphorus and graphene. The current measured from the device increases when an electron is trapped, and decreases when it is released. Since electrons move in and out of the ..
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