Behind every secure online transaction or encrypted message lies a string of completely unpredictable numbers. A team of physicists has now proposed a theoretical way around a long-standing roadblock, opening the door to next-generation security chips that protect everyday data without slowing performance.

In a study published in Physical Review Letters, a research team co-led by Rice University’s Jun-Jie Zhang and Boris Yakobson describes a new class of materials. The research was conducted in collaboration with Shuai Dong, chair of the School of Physics at Southeast University in China.

These materials, called autferroics, could speed up physical true random number generators (TRNG) thousands of times while keeping signals clear.