A Mold-Powered Encryption Engine

Digital security is a constant cat-and-mouse game between security researchers and malicious hackers. New encryption techniques are developed, flaws are found and exploited, and patches are issued — the cycle goes on and on ad infinitum. With advances in machine learning, and especially quantum computing, it appears that this race is really going to heat up. Exactly what the future holds is, as always, difficult to determine. But chances are good that the decades ahead will see many of the encryption algorithms we rely on today rendered obsolete.

There may be very little that most of us can do to change that, but at least we can have a pet that improves the strength of our encryption algorithms now. Artist Stephanie Rentschler has created a device called SlimeMoldCrypt that leverages the chaotic movements of slime mold to strengthen encryption.

It is more art than a practical technology, however. SlimeMoldCrypt has dials that allow a user to control the light, humidity, and nourishment given to the mold. The more it thrives, the more it moves. And the more it moves, the more randomness there is to seed a traditional encryption algorithm so that it can create an unpredictable key. If the mold croaks, you might as well just hand your data over to the people in the Guy Fawkes masks.

The device is powered by a Raspberry Pi Pico development board. A ring of RGB LEDs lights up the underside of a Petri dish, which is under observation by a microscope. The details are not provided, but most likely, images of the slime mold are captured and turned into a random number to seed an encryption algorithm.

Well, I for one certainly did not have seeing a slime mold-powered encryption engine on my bingo card today. It just goes to show you never know what hardware hackers are going to come up with next.