Cyber Defense eMagazine May 2019

an entire enterprise or organization, then what? If you’re like many others, these questions could make
you stop and think for more than just a few moments. It takes a significant degree of technical expertise
and knowhow in order to effectively integrate encryption into regular business operations and workflows.
Ciphers are generally rigid and single-purpose-driven.
Ciphers are generally rigid within their specified modes of operation and could be characterized as
purpose-driven. For example, there is a reason that Daniel J Bernstein gained significant acclaim on the
worldwide academic stage with his introduction of ChaCha20 and Salsa family of XOR-based streaming
ciphers. Simply stated, the AES standard (in its various modes of operations) and other block-ciphers
like it are far less performant when it comes to handling streaming media. Why else would it have
captured the attention of big players like Google? At the same time, hardware performance boosts
available to the AES family of ciphers propel it ahead of ChaCha20 when it comes to large datasets and
file-based encryption. AES encryption benefits massively from the inline hardware acceleration that are
now commonly included in most Intel Chips. In other words, one flavor of encryption does not fit all
applications.
What if you could have it both ways?
What if you could have it both ways? In 2019 Secure Channels Inc. launched the ground-breaking
XOTIC cryptosystem; a hybridized streaming / block cipher with a “dialable” (user configurable)
encryption strength. With less than 1millisecond initialization time, XOTIC is more than 99% faster than
AES-256 when encrypting small to modestly-sized data, and blazes past ChaCha20 when encrypting
streaming media. XOTIC operates at a minimum of 512bit strength and can be easily “dialed-up” to
extreme levels, leaving behind all other block cipher encryption algorithms.
Flexibility is an essential aspect and goal in next generation encryption.
Flexibility is an essential aspect of modern computing platforms and XOTIC delivers on that challenge.
XOTIC has recently been deployed to the general public as an email encryption plugin for Microsoft
Outlook Office 365, a Windows shell-integrated ZIP utility, and an encryption-as-a-service website. It’s
been embedded into hardware used by the Hollywood film and entertainment industry, as well as into
discrete military applications. Later this summer, XOTIC will be deployed and made available for
download at the Apple Store in IOS native apps, Google Play for Android. Products scheduled for release
in 2019 even include a ground-breaking new streaming video communications platform.
There’s really no true privacy without a better encryption model.
Did you know that when you initiate an online chat or video-call with many of today’s popular instantmessaging
apps, you are actually only establishing standard (mathematically reversible) PKI-based
encryption keys once? Many apps do this only at the time an application is started. This begs the
question, “how many different people did you chat with while your instant messaging application was
open?” Knowing that all of those ‘private’ conversations are taking place on the same breakable
asymmetric cipher leaves us feeling uneasy. This is in part what prompted Secure Channels to deploy
XOTIC into streaming chat apps. Faster XOTIC encryption enciphers (and generates new keys) for every
individual video frame and audio packet of a high-definition video contained in a streaming online chat
conversation, and without any loss in fidelity. The difference in the level of security protection compared
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