The greatest cryptographer of modern times, Adi Shamir, envisioned that cracking secret messages will become irrelevant, since so much is learned from a secret message without knowing its content: who talked to whom, when, for how long, how often, on which channels -- today AI sleuths learn on us more that they care to know through wealth of meta data that we spill all around us. Encryption gives us an illusion of privacy, luring us to reveal our most intimate secrets under the expectation that the cipher that protect s us is robust enough -- while in fact it matters little.

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To achieve privacy in modern day cyberspace, we need to wipe out all meta data from our conversations.

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That was the innovation objective declared by our interdisciplinary innovation science group, not too long ago. It was a worthy innovation objective because when launched we were clueless as to what will happen next. A few months later we had a concept and yesterday we filed our first patent.

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A visible cyberspace conversation generates meta data at any turn. We first looked for means to quickly wipe out any meta data as it emerges. This did not go very well. So we focused on the adjective "visible" and the conclusion came fast and bright. Invisible conversations do not generate meta data. From there we kicked in our AI Innovation Accelerator, that led us to "Hiding-in-Plain-Sight (HIPS) cryptography".

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The guiding idea was that the vast majority of our cyberspace activity has no privacy currency. I really don't mind that a stranger will find out that yesterday at 6PM I asked my brother in law, a reporter for the Washington Post, if his sprained ankle still bothers him. However, when I tell him that my boss destroys financial data before Elon Musk shows up -- privacy is a critical requirement. Most of my conversations with my brother in law, or with anyone else, are of the first category -- no privacy needs. There are very few highly sensitive messages. This imbalance can be exploited.

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Our BitMint team has figured out a cryptographic protocol that can hide secret messages in plain sight -- namely in non-secret ordinary unencrypted messages. To an observer me and my brother in law are chatting back and forth about his sprained ankle, about his game, his neighbors, his car. And somehow this mundane unassuming unsuspicious text is pregnant with a very secret message -- invisible and hence without any metadata to track.

HIPS cryptography uses the large volume of mundane, unassuming, uninteresting, privacy-irrelevant cyberspace conversations as the big pile of hay in which to conceal the proverbial needle.  

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A social exchange media that would deploy HIPS cryptography will allow its users to talk privately to other users -- ultimate privacy, talk without leaving any evidence that a conversation took place.

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Privacy is a precursor for Freedom. If you want freedom in cyberspace, first ensure privacy, if you want privacy in cyberspace, use HIPS.

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The BitMint team is looking for strategic partners * Gideon Samid, CTO, Gideon@BitMint.com