Thanks! You absolutely could just use the webcam and identify the faces on the cube - I just thought my bluetooth cube would be cooler to integrate but there's not much stopping me from adding that in. I had the cube for a little while but I struggled to decode the messages for a long time, so I made a little npm package based off of the work from CsTimer. Here's the package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/gan-i3-356-bluetooth

I've signed over the copyright to IEEE so I think I've got to ask them before I put it there - that is a great point though, I'll see if I can drop it in there.

It's a novelty. Something more tuned for a scene in a movie than providing security for an individual.

But, the way I see it, you have the traditionally "solved" state cube on your desk(all faces complete), and when you want to use it as a key you "solve" the cube to the state that represents your key.

With a rubiks cube this means you only need to remember the steps of the algorithm that leads you to your key state.

It would be interesting if I could take your scrambled cube add my message, scramble it, and then tell you a way to descramble it only on the original unscrambled cube.

Yeah, this explains why this cryptography paper was published in a ML conference. Any reasonable reviewer would reject this as not providing sufficient security.

192 bits?

I must be missing something here, there are 25 unique dice that can be permuted, each can have six potential sides showing, and 4 potential orientations of the displayed face... So (25!)×(25×6×4) ? Isn't that more like only 93 bits?

Well obviously harder to scan from a phone, I think a deck of playing cards would be easier to acquire and store. Shuffling 27 would give you 93 bits, shuffling the full 52 would be ~226.

Thanks!