Good for them if they did. Finally somebody used it. I noticed a paper of mine citated in a patent
They refer to my paper
A] JORMA JORMAKKA ET AL: “UAV-based Sensor Networks for Future Force Warriors”, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON ADVANCES IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS, vol. 4, no. 1, 1 January 2011 (2011-01-01), pages 58 – 71, XP055518255
where I have the protocol and the figure here does look like my key exchange:
As you may remember, one-time-pad (ODP) is a simple cryptosystem with perfect security: the key is as long as data. You just XOR the key to data and nobody can ever break the encryption. The only problem with the system is that you need the long key and sending any data you very fast use the key. Therefore the system is seldom used.
My ODP exchange protocol send from Alice to Bob a one-time-pad encrypted with another one-time-pad. One of the ODPs you keep and the second ODP you throw away. Clearly, as the second ODP is just random data, there is no way to break this key exchange by reading data of the key exchange. Alice and Bob need to know the same seed, an initial element of some bit length (say 4000 bits to make it hard), but even if you should guess this seed, it only crypts random data (the other ODP that you do not use for anything), so you could never know that you guessed it. We conclude that the ODP exchange has perfect security. But what you get is a long key, the other ODP. The algorithm is fast as all you do is XOR.
If you use the ODP to encrypt real data, it is no longer a valid one-time-pad (because guessing the seed gives the whole ODP, if there is a way to know if you guessed correctly). If a malicious Mallory reads both your sending of data encrypted with this ODP and the data on the key exchange and guesses the seed, he can verify that it is the correct seed because your data decrypts correctly for the whole length of the transmission.
But no harm (and it is clearly stated in the paper): it is not perfect security, but it is perfect computational security: Mallory indeed has to guess the seed. There is no trapdoor, cryptoanalysis, usage errors, or anything that could help him. His only way to break the pad is to guess the seed and if the seed is long enough, he cannot guess it. (My paper discusses only the key exchange, not how you should use the ODP. You do not XOR the ODP to your data but use an element of the ODP as a one-time key of a sufficiently good algorithm to stop attacks on individual bits of the seed. The cost of using the key exchange is that it doubles the bandwidth, but something you can pay for perfect computational security. )
Many people think that if quantum cryptography fulfills its promise, all possible keys can be tried at the same time. So, the seed could be found, assuming that somebody can check if the decrypted data makes any sense. But to check that decrypted data makes any sense if there are 2 to power 40000 alternatives to check will not be possible. What it means that data makes sense (is plain text) is not necessarily so easily programmed. I am sure that perfect computational security is good enough. The worry one has with common cryptoalgoriths is not that somebody can check by brute force all combinations but that there is some easier way. Well, in my method there is none. It is as close to one-time-pad as you can get. No structure.
This is not the only patent I am connected with. I do (did) have one patent with my name:
https://www1.epa.ee/patent/data.asp?NroParam=P200000779&ID=X550982&NID=&offset=3100&HKR=
It seems to be that this is now invalid, so it got outdated. It was valid for a quite long time.