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 260 || AWSAR Awarded Popular Science Stories - 2019
The Future of Secrets
  Ms. Keerthi K.*
Email: keerthikamalakshan@gmail.com
The sky was dark and the clouds were grey, it was about to rain. My friend David and I rushed into a nearby coffee shop. We were talking about everything under the sun.
“Have you seen the movie Now You See Me Too? It’s an amazing movie. It’s a magic caper thriller movie,” David asked.
“Hmmm...,” I nodded.
“I was wondering, can magic be used with bad intentions?” he added, “It’s just a movie. Why should that bother me?” he asked after a pause.
“You have to. You live in a ‘world of secrets’!!! ”I interrupted.
“What?” his eyes were out on stalks.
“See, in the current world, everything is digitized. Even this coffee was paid using a
smart card, where the PIN is kept a secret,” I responded.
“Yes, it’s a secret!! No one knows this including my girlfriend). Then for what should I be worried?” anxiety rose on his face.
“Look at that card reader,” I pointed him to the vendor’s card reader, “Can you trust them? Can you think of some techniques, like real magic to retrieve secret information?” I added. “I’m in a dilemma, can you be more clear about what exactly you mean?” he wondered aloud. “See, in the real world, all the transactions are encrypted, that is, it is not in a human- readable format. Consider encryption as a black box, with some input (say PIN) and the corresponding output.” I pointed to an image on my phone.
 * Ms. Keerthi K., PhD Scholar from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, is pursuing her research on “Fault Analysis and Formal Verification”. Her popular science story entitled “The Future of Secrets” has been selected for AWSAR Award.




















































































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