The Story Of A Man Becoming A Secret Key
Becoming A Secret KeyAsymmetric encryption is being used more and more to protect users’ privacy. But when it comes to security, there is always a chance to lose an access to your own data. Secret keys, needed to read encrypted information, are very hard to remember. Recently, many techniques became available to simplify dealing with secret keys. In general, it was an effort to represent a secret key in a way that is easy enough to remember. But it only got even worse — the illusion of simplicity resulted in careless attitude towards storing access keys.
It is not the problem of how to express or store secret keys, it’s actually the problem of how to make losing keys impossible. Well, recent developments in genomics have shown us that we all have the vault of genetic information in every cell of our body. Since everyone has a unique genetic makeup, it can be used to reliably identify individual as well as to generate secret keys.
The idea that you cannot lose your DNA or change it during lifetime gives a great insight on how to achieve secure handling of secret keys in a way they cannot be lost. That’s the proof of DNA — using genetic information as a seed. That’s the simplest way to implement the idea, but it has a drawback — your genetic information can be stolen. To overcome this issue, many solutions have been proposed ranging from requiring additional data when generating a seed from genetic information to using sophisticated hardware devices. A research is now going on finding the best solution. But nevertheless, using genetic makeup as a source of entropy for generating secret keys is one of the most promising application of emerging Zenome platform.
Another possible application is authorization based on genetic information. In future, when portable genetic sequencing is possible, it can be used to read requested regions of DNA. The idea of genetic authorization is very simple. At first, an authorization service sends to handheld sequencer what regions of DNA to read. The sequencer reads these fragments and sends them back. If correct, a user gets authorized. The Zenome platform is going to have all the prerequisites to implement this method of authorization.
Well, that is not a science-fiction. Also, that is not overestimation of scientific achievements. All these can be achieved with a technology that already exists — check out Nanopore ! What’s missing, you may ask? Well, what is missing is a platform that is capable of processing genetic information in a private and secure way. Zenome is aiming to become that missing element, greatly enhancing both privacy and usability by integrating genetic data and encryption technique.
Zenome will make it possible to encrypt your secrets by the key that lies deep inside of you.
Just think about it.
Stay tuned!
