Melbourne researchers hide crypto keys on terabyte disc
Tiny, polarised rods to boost security.
Researchers at Melbourne’s Swinburne University have developed a way to enhance encryption on removable discs and boost storage capacity to potentially a petabyte.
The technique involves a polarised laser beam to read and write information on gold nanorods that could be used to coat optical storage disks like DVDs.
Swinburne professor Min Gu explained that in traditional optical data storage, information was encoded in three dimensions, in the form of "tiny dots ... read on a flat plane".
The new method added two more variables -- polarisation and the colour spectrum -- as well as "skewed" angles, at which data was previously unreadable.
He said the research may be helpful for phototherapy cancer treatments – which also use gold nanorods – because it reduces the time patients are exposed to lasers.