Why must non-cryptographers be so dumb? (Score 3, Insightful)

There's so much wrong with this, I don't know where to start.

First, Cryptography is hard. Even professional cryptographers with decades of experience still get it wrong -- often. Considering as this guy has essentially no previous experience (he's an EE professor), it's already near certain that he's dead wrong.

Second, he doesn't provide "absolutely secure" communications. He provides non-interceptable communications. He's totally ignoring authentication, non-repudiation, man-in-the-middle attacks, and half a dozen other very important problems. (It's also not a cipher, but we'll ignore that slip.)

He also assumes (from the abstract) that an eavesdropper can only eavesdrop by injecting current into the wire, which is blatantly false. One could easily tap the magnetic field generated by current in the wire, without drawing very much power from the wire at all.

And to top it all off, he's depending on the precise values of voltage and current, which means this is an analog system. Analog systems are notoriously difficult to build precisely -- which is why we're using digital everywhere.

This is such bad research that I can't wait until Bruce Schneier get ahold of this.