BLITZ BUREAU
NEW DELHI: In a major breakthrough, a team of Indian scientists has created a user-friendly way to generate unpredictable random numbers crucial for stronger data encryption and provide robust cybersecurity, the Ministry of Science & Technology has said.
The Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru, which is an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), performed a photonic experiment to demonstrate a violation of what is called the Leggett Garg Inequalities (LGI) — a litmus test for “quantumness” in a system in a loophole-free manner.
The team carried out extensive research in collaboration with researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, IISER-Thiruvananthapuram and the Bose Institute, Kolkata to use such LGI violation in a completely unexplored domain — truly unpredictable random number generation, secure against device tampering and imperfections.
These numbers are crucial in applications like cryptographic key generation, secure password creation and digital signatures, among others.With further engineering interventions and innovations, devices adopting this method could find powerful applications not only in cybersecurity and data encryption but also in diverse areas like economic surveys and drug designing/testing.
“We have successfully generated random numbers using temporal correlations certified by the violation of the Leggett Garg Inequality (LGI),” said Professor Urbasi Sinha, faculty at the QuIC lab at Raman Research Institute, and the corresponding author of the paper published in the Physical Review Letters.
