Researchers at Lancaster University in the U.K. have hit on a radically new way to encrypt data while exploring a completely different scientific field: human biology.

While working to map and understand how the human heart and lungs coordinate rhythms by passing information to one another, researchers created software models to simulate the natural communication. They realized the same modeling could be applied to encryption.

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The encryption method is based on coupling functions, which are what allow the heart and lungs to exist independently while operating in sync. Tomislav Stankovski, Peter McClintock and Aneta Stefanovska of the Lancaster University physics department published their findings in the American Physical Society’s journal, Physical Review X. They also filed a patent entitled “Encoding Data Using Dynamic System Coupling,” along with another Lancaster University physics professor Robert Young.

The two ends of encryption, the sender and the receiver (or server), are what the researchers view as dynamic systems representing the heart and lungs. The information is encrypted at various times on both ends and decrypted using coupling functions, so the data only makes sense in the context of both the sender and receiver. According to the researchers, the method is also unaffected by external fluctuations or “noise” that could interrupt the data streams.

The coupling functions transmit and receive multiple encrypted signals simultaneously, creating an unlimited number of possibilities for the shared encryption key and making it virtually impossible to decrypt using traditional methods.

“Here we offer a novel encryption scheme derived from biology, radically different from any earlier procedure,” Stankovski explained in a Lancaster University news release. “Inspired by the time-varying nature of the cardio-respiratory coupling functions recently discovered in humans, we propose a new encryption scheme that is highly resistant to conventional methods of attack.”

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