I had the chance to spend time with Chief Extraction Architect Steve Chao about the new technology that Detron is developing. He’s working on high-level encryption for the masses. This stuff is not connect the dots to open a file. We’re talking serious encryption that apparently is extremely difficult to break. It’s called QDK or Quantum Direct Key. It’s so secure that the claim is it hasn’t been broken yet…AT ALL. If you’d like to give it a try you can find the Code Challenge here.

I loved speaking with Steve, and what I got was that he is extremely passionate about the technology and extremely confident in it to boot. He explained that the encryption works with two keys. One public and one private. The private key is generated by some machine (Key Management Center) that is in some deserted place Mars somewhere in the boonies, and is never online. No one knows where it is while the other key is generated by the phone itself. Mr. Chao divulged in the interview below that a random number is used as a key and is generated by “thermal noise on the chip“ which is then used to open up an encrypted file. However, that number was encrypted as well so you would need to decrypt one key to decrypt the real key to decrypt the file! This sounds pretty tough to get around to me and should stop lower skilled baddies from even trying.

This technology will be fitted to the Defense phone that Detron is developing. It has a 4.3″ Sharp qHD screen, an aluminum frame, and a dual-core ARMv7 Cortex A9 1GHz CPU with 1Ghz of RAM. There will be a 16G and 32G option. With that said, I want one, and I want one NOW! The possibilities for secure transactions of all sorts via the cell phone or whatever medium file transfers exist is seemingly endless. I would definitely feel more secure using this technology while making online purchases, or reviewing sensitive documents online. This has huge implications for in-app purchases or apps like Square which allow credit card transactions via the cell phone or tablet. Once we get more time to review the phone we’ll have that up for you. In the mean-time check out the interview with Steve Chao below: