Total Pageviews

Search This Blog

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Thoughts on the aperiodic monotile and its application to cryptography



It's made up of 8 kite-shaped tiles. I haven't checked, but they seem to be non-cyclic quadrilaterals. Intriguingly, each kite shape is made up of 2 right triangles joined along the hypotenuse.

One could argue that the true monotile is the kite shape. It also would not surprise me if any non-cyclic quadrilateral made up of right triangles would also be a monotile.

Now imagine the tile above (or joined set of them) is laid on a grid. It would be easy enough to send a few sets of coordinates for the vertices to someone so they could verify with their own tile key that you are trustworthy. 

Verifying the coordinates of the vertices is easy, but reconstructing the key from that info is hard. It's the geometric equivalent of the integer factorization problem and thus represents a kind of one-way function. 

Furthermore, any right triangle can be divided into an arbitrary number of similar right triangles. By picking a set of similar right triangles and constructing a monotile pattern, one could make an infinite number of geometric keys, sort of like the way random numbers are used in one-time pad cryptography.

Another way to think of is like a prison steganography template, the kind with a few holes that when placed on a letter reveals the actual message while the rest of the text of the letter is just a distraction. 


 

No comments: