My first paper: A practical implementation of Rubiks cube based passkeys(ieeexplore.ieee.org)
55 pointsby acorn221a month ago9 comments
  • ecesenaa month ago
    Cool demo, but this is only log2(43 quintillions) = 65 bit security.

    Kind of related is DiceKeys, with 192 bit security: https://www.crowdsupply.com/dicekeys/dicekeys

    • Terr_25 days ago
      192 bits?

      I must be missing something here, there are 25 unique dice that can be permuted, each can have six potential sides showing, and 4 potential orientations of the displayed face... So (25!)×(25×6×4) ? Isn't that more like only 93 bits?

      Well obviously harder to scan from a phone, I think a deck of playing cards would be easier to acquire and store. Shuffling 27 would give you 93 bits, shuffling the full 52 would be ~226.

      • ecesena24 days ago
        It’s explained in the link. I actually misremembered, it’s 196 bits.
        • Terr_24 days ago
          Never mind, with the benefit if sleep I see an error in my math.

          Still, I wonder if a similar thing could be done by shuffling a deck of cards, and then riffling the results past a good camera so that an app can recognize the sequence in order. Perhaps it would be vulnerable to common shuffling mistakes?

        • 24 days ago
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    • warkdarriora month ago
      Yeah, this explains why this cryptography paper was published in a ML conference. Any reasonable reviewer would reject this as not providing sufficient security.
      • 0manrhoa month ago
        It's pretty upfront about being a novelty project done by a self-described non-crypto expert, and I don't see any assertions of it guaranteeing any degree of sufficiency/security or claiming any such NextBigThing(TM) hype.

        Just because a paper is published doesn't mean it wasn't done for fun/the hell of it.

        • acorn221a month ago
          Yeah this is bang on. I messaged my old supervisor from uni about turning CubeAuthn into a paper and she suggested I submit the paper to that conf.
  • nritchiea month ago
    This is a great example of the "I wonder if I could"-kind of research. It doesn't have to be practical. I doubt the authors intend it as a viable security product. It is the kind of "just playing around" thinking that can sometimes lead to brilliant insights. Keep up the good work.
  • kazinatora month ago
    If you add orientation arrows to the center squares, you can add a couple of bits to the strength.

    There are multiple ways to solve the cube, if orientation of the center pieces is made visible and significant.

  • ramses0a month ago
    Awesome! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44768459

    Couldn't you "just" use a webcam to scan any particular cube? Seems like you could "easily" detect when you've seen all 6 unique faces and there should be libraries around that will read cubes.

    • acorn221a month ago
      Thanks! You absolutely could just use the webcam and identify the faces on the cube - I just thought my bluetooth cube would be cooler to integrate but there's not much stopping me from adding that in. I had the cube for a little while but I struggled to decode the messages for a long time, so I made a little npm package based off of the work from CsTimer. Here's the package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/gan-i3-356-bluetooth
  • charcircuita month ago
    We've already established that pattern based passcodes are terrible for security. I expect this to be worse than patterns because people can not easily remember or know how to fix mistakes which will result in most people picking simple ones.
  • midldeia month ago
    Why leave the paper out of the git repo?

    If you are the author could you link to a copy of the paper?

    • acorn221a month ago
      I've signed over the copyright to IEEE so I think I've got to ask them before I put it there - that is a great point though, I'll see if I can drop it in there.
      • wizzwizz425 days ago
        The usual way this works is, you retain rights to the preprint. That's what preprint repositories like https://arxiv.org/ are for. Talk to your advisor, if you have one; if not, the folk over at Academia Stack Exchange are probably familiar with the exact rules of that IEEE journal.
      • Terrettaa month ago
        Is that how they do it, rather than you assigning rights to make copies, while retaining your own copyright?
  • cat-whisperer25 days ago
    this sounds cool!
  • a month ago
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  • elbcia month ago
    So my cube-key will look to anybody else as a regular scrambled cube. If my kid finds it and solves it, I'm kind of doomed, right? So what's the plan, I'm supposed to remember the state of the cube?

    A admit I'm dumb and lazy - I didn't read the paper, maybe it's covered there - but this sounds quite vulnerable to dictionary attacks, like those phone unlock paass where everybody puts a Z, the cube-keys will mostly be "Solved with red/yellow middles swapped"

    • midldeia month ago
      It's a novelty. Something more tuned for a scene in a movie than providing security for an individual.

      But, the way I see it, you have the traditionally "solved" state cube on your desk(all faces complete), and when you want to use it as a key you "solve" the cube to the state that represents your key.

      With a rubiks cube this means you only need to remember the steps of the algorithm that leads you to your key state.

    • avadodina month ago
      It would be interesting if I could take your scrambled cube add my message, scramble it, and then tell you a way to descramble it only on the original unscrambled cube.