• Experimental setup ensures a loophole-free violation of Leggett Garg Inequalities, providing an additional advantage of generating loophole-free randomness.
• Devices adopting this method could find powerful applications not only in cybersecurity and data encryption but also in diverse areas, such as economic surveys and drug designing/testing.

A team of Indian scientists has developed a user-friendly approach to generate unpredictable random numbers, a crucial component for strengthening data encryption and improving cybersecurity, as announced by the Ministry of Science & Technology.

The Raman Research Institute, an autonomous institute under the Department of Science and Technology (DST), conducted a photonic experiment to demonstrate a violation of the Leggett Garg Inequalities (LGI), a benchmark for detecting “quantumness” in a system in a loophole-free manner.

Immune to device tampering

The research team, which collaborated with researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), IISER-Thiruvananthapuram, and the Bose Institute in Kolkata, aimed to utilise this LGI violation for generating truly unpredictable random numbers, which are immune to device tampering and imperfections.

These random numbers are essential for various applications, including cryptographic key generation, secure password creation, and digital signatures.

Professor Urbasi Sinha, the corresponding author of the paper published in the Physical Review Letters, stated, “We have successfully generated random numbers using temporal correlations certified by the violation of the Leggett Garg Inequality (LGI).”

Furthermore, she highlighted that the experimental setup ensures a loophole-free violation of the LGI, providing an additional advantage of generating loophole-free randomness.

A robust solution for data protection

According to the researchers, this new method offers enhanced protection, as it uses truly random numbers to generate keys that will be used to encrypt passwords, which are crucial in our daily lives.

With further engineering interventions and innovations, the devices adopting this method could find powerful applications not only in cybersecurity and data encryption but also in diverse areas, such as economic surveys and drug designing/testing.

This groundbreaking research by the Indian scientific community has the potential to significantly contribute to the field of cybersecurity, providing a robust solution for data protection and encryption that can have far-reaching implications for various sectors.