There are press releases. Then there are out of body experiences.

Cryptography firm Crown Sterling announced a new product called Time AI. It leaves ordinary buzzwords like “seamless” and “omnichannel” in the dust, reaching instead for a heady mix of mathematics, quantum computing, mysticism, and privacy handwringing.

Let’s take a look. Commentary is mine.

Crown Sterling Unveils TIME AI™ – the World’s First ‘Non-factor’ Based Quantum Encryption Technology at Black Hat 2019 Crown Sterling’s Revolutionary TIME AI™ Technology Enables Data Sovereignty for Consumers and Enterprises Globally August 07, 2019 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time LAS VEGAS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Crown Sterling, a leading digital cryptography firm, today unveiled TIME AI™, the world’s first dynamic ‘non-factor’ based quantum AI encryption software to protect data privacy for consumers and enterprise systems – www.timeai.io. TIME AI™ is based on the recent discovery from Crown Sterling’s Founder and CEO, Robert E. Grant, in which he recently identified the first Infinite Prime Number prediction pattern.

For those keeping track at home, score extra points for the buzzwords “quantum AI encryption,” “data sovereignty,” and one weasel word point for “revolutionary.”

But it’s got math!

As it turns out, I studied number theory in college and in the Ph.D. math program at MIT, so I’m not exactly an amateur here. So I can tell you that prime number prediction is not really a thing. Prime numbers obey certain patterns just by virtue of their not having factors, but there is no way to predict them. You can statistically predict their distribution, and you can prove some facts about them, but there is no way to predict them. (I might also mention that the computational challenge of identifying primes and prime factors is the basis for all modern cryptography, so if there was an easy way to predict which numbers were prime, the whole basis of cryptography would collapse. You can imagine how much effort has gone into that question as a result.)

Utilizing multi-dimensional encryption technology, including time, music’s infinite variability, artificial intelligence, and most notably mathematical constancies to generate entangled key pairs, TIME AI™ is designed to wrap around all data and applications to secure the world’s most valuable asset — data. Crown Sterling is demonstrating TIME AI™ this week at Black Hat 2019 in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, Booth Number 1304.

Potentially qualifies as the most surreal sentence to ever appear in a press release. “Time, music’s infinite variability, artificial intelligence, and most notably mathematical constancies to generate entangled key pairs” — yeah, that’s the kinda stuff that doesn’t occur to you until after your third LSD trip. The technical term for this form of language is “woo-woo.”

“Today’s introduction of Crown Sterling’s TIME AI™ will transform the way we secure data, currently the world’s most valuable asset,” said Grant. “We believe whomever creates the data leading to its value should have the ability to control it and its value creation. Consumers’ primary concerns are privacy and identity theft, while enterprises value data security. Either way, they face the same challenge: how to better protect and control their data and its dissemination.”

If this is as revolutionary as you say, there’s no need to wrap yourself in the clothing of a privacy advocate. Data needs security. Nobody gives a crap about your libertarian ideals around it.

In March of 2019, Grant identified the first Infinite Prime Number prediction pattern, where the discovery was published on Cornell University’s www.arXiv.org titled: “Accurate and Infinite Prime Number Prediction from Novel Quasi-Prime Analytical Methodology.” The paper was co-authored by Physicist and Number Theorist Talal Ghannam PhD. The discovery challenges today’s current encryption framework by enabling the accurate prediction of prime numbers. Grant will also give a presentation at Black Hat titled, “Discovery of Quasi-Prime Numbers: What Does this Mean for Encryption?” related to his paper published through Cornell University.

So I read the paper for you. My impression is that it is a naive analysis reflecting some basic patterns that would be clear from taking the 101-level number theory course, combined with some noodling around “digital roots” (which are dependent on our base-10 numbering system, and therefore not all that relevant to a paper regarding numbers in general). The paper is not peer reviewed, and I don’t expect it to survive peer review.

But it does have a beautiful picture in it, which I have reproduced below.

I don’t imagine this breakthrough will actually revolutionize data security. But it has already broken new ground in press releases, so who knows.

Image source: “Accurate and Infinite Prime Prediction from Novel Quasi-Prime

Analytical Methodology” by Robert E. Grant and Talal Ghannam.