Paper 2016/499

Drone Targeted Cryptography

Gideon Samid

Abstract

As flying, camera-bearing drones get smaller and lighter, they increasingly choke on the common ciphers as they interpret their commands, and send back their footage. New paradigm cryptography allows for minimum power, adjustable randomness security to step in, and enable this emerging technology to spy, follow, track, and detect. E.g.: to find survivors in a collapsed structure. We describe here a cryptographic premise where intensive computation is avoided, and security is achieved via non-complex processing of at-will size keys. The proposed approach is to increase the role of randomness, and to build ciphers that can handle any size key without choking on computation. Orthodox cryptography seeks to create a thorough mix between key bits and message bits, resulting in heavy-duty computation. Let’s explore simple, fast ciphers that allow their user to adjust the security of the ciphertext by determining how much randomness to use. We present “Walk in the Park” cipher where the “walk” may be described through the series of visited spots (the plaintext), or, equivalently through a list of the traversed walkways (ciphertext). The “walking park” being the key, determines security by its size. Yet, the length of the “walk” is determined by the size of the plaintext, not the size of the “park”. We describe a use scenario for the proposed cipher: a drone taking videos of variable sensitivity and hence variable required security – handled by the size of the “park”.