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UPD alumnus develops a human genome-inspired cryptography platform
By Jaspher Kyllle M. Visico
Marvin De los Santos, an alumnus from the UP Diliman National Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (NIMBB), has developed HugeCrypt—a human genome-inspired cryptography platform for digital security.
Combining his years of experience in the biomedical research industry, his interest in bioenterprise and innovation from the NIMBB, and the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI), De los Santos initially founded a life science research program through ChordexBio. It is an AI-centered platform advancing intelligence systems around genomic sciences.
HugeCrypt emerged from their continuous efforts in ChordexBio and is an innovation structured for decoding the language of the human genome. It “experiments with transforming digital credentials into genome-inspired representations. The goal is to make passwords harder to read, harder to guess, and more difficult to reverse-engineer, especially in an age of increasingly powerful AI tools and emerging quantum computing.”
Despite the limited use of genomics in cryptography, De los Santos posits that genomic innovation space is a fitting avenue to significantly improve cybersecurity.
“[HugeCrypt] will give you a high entropy password. ‘Yung combination of the alphanumeric sequences are not found sa dictionary,” De los Santos quipped in an interview.
De los Santos acknowledges that HugeCrypt is still a new platform. While the website is already accessible online (https://hugecrypt.chordexbio.com/), he notes that further refinements can still be made based on the experience of end users and perspective of future research contributors.
He also pointed out two primary bottlenecks for the platform’s ongoing development: its technical complexity, which may alienate less tech-savvy users, and its heavy reliance on high-level AI computing resources.
De los Santos earned his bachelor’s degree in biology from the Mariano Marcos State University and his master’s degree in molecular biology and biotechnology from the NIMBB in 2019.