A Call for Time Travel Resistant Cryptography (TTRC)

At CHES 2019 [rump session], I presented my revolutionary talk on Time Travel Resistant Cryptography (TTRC). This is a hugely important area of research that has been widely ignored in academic work, and it’s time to finally make this right.

Why is this so critical? While Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) gets NIST contests, and invested companies, nobody is considering TTRC. The general thought-process of PQC is that the existence of sufficiently powerful quantum computers is an open problem with no clear solution. BUT – if someone solves that problem (that is unclear is even physically possible to solve), it’s going to be hell on Earth for crypto implementations. Better safe than sorry.

That sounds a hell of a lot like some other problems to me.

And that problem even have had multiple movies made about it:

Image result for time travel back to the future

Lots of open questions exist. But note that many of them are not so unreasonable. For example – what if time travel requires us to create a Closed Timelike Curve (CTC), and time travel is only possible from the point that curve is created and onward.

This would mean that from the point the CTC is created crypto would immediately be broken, but any point before that (i.e., now) is safe. Thus we must create TTRC implementations since we cannot know when CTCs could be created.

I discuss many of these problems in my CHES 2019 Rump Presentation, you can see the slides below. When video is posted I’ll update this blog post with such material.

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