Lifeboats on the Titanic Cryptography

Gideon Samid

Paper 2025/587

Lifeboats on the Titanic Cryptography

Gideon Samid

, Case Western Reserve University

Abstract

The Titanic was the ship that "could not sink," fortunately its designers installed lifeboats (not enough) despite having no logical grounding for this waste of space and material. It was out of respect for unforeseen surprises. NIST-Post Quantum Ciphers represent the best and the brightest in world crypto intelligence. They are certified as good for their purpose. And likely so, alas, not surely so. If we could find a crypto equivalent for the Titanic Lifeboats, should not we load them up for our journey? Indeed, pattern-devoid cryptography is the crypto equivalent of the lifeboats that mitigated the Titanic disaster. Pattern-Devoid cryptography (PDC) may be deemed inelegant, inconvenient, and bloated, but it will hold up against quantum computers more powerful than expected, and more importantly, it will hold up against adversarial mathematical talent greater than expected. Which is why we should put up with its negatives, and install it just in case the Titanic story repeats itself in cyberspace. This article elaborates on this proposition.

Note: Lifeboat-on-the-Titanic cryptography is an application of Pattern-Devoid Cryptography which has been peer-review published as a chapter in a new book: https://www.intechopen.com/online-first/pattern-devoid-cryptography

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Preprint.
Keywords: pattern-devoid cryptography randomness post-quantum cryptography
Contact author(s): gideon @ bitmint com
History: 2025-04-04: approved; 2025-04-01: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2025/587
License: CC BY-NC-ND

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/587,
      author = {Gideon Samid},
      title = {Lifeboats on the Titanic Cryptography},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/587},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/587}
}