http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/technology/wired/story.html?s=n/reuters /980220/wired/stories/chaos_1.html Friday February 20 9:44 AM EST Chaos may hold key to encryption, researchers say WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The key to secret communications may lie in chaos, researchers reported Thursday. They said they managed to encrypt information by making use of a noisy and chaotic optical circuit. Gregory VanWiggeren and Rjarshi Roy of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta said they were able to use the chaotic fluctuations in a light signal to hide information. Duplicating qualities of the transmitter allowed them to decode the message. The value of such tools is growing as electronic commerce becomes more widespread and businesses try to encode their material for secure transactions and communications. They did not suggest how their scientific experiment, which they reported in the journal Science, might be given a practical application. VanWiggeren and Roy said they used an erbium-doped fiber ring laser. "These lasers are particularly well suited for communication purposes purposes because their lasing wavelengths roughly correspond to the minimum-loss wavelength in optical fiber," they wrote. "A small 10 megahertz message was embedded in the larger chaotic carrier and transmitted to the receiver system," they added. "The receiver has the same non-linearities as the transmitter, allowing it to unfold the message from the chaos." Researchers have in the past been able to bury messages in a noisy electronic circuit but the low bandwidths of the systems make them less practical for high-speed communications. Optical circuits have higher bandwidths. "These preliminary but intriguing results suggest that chaos-based applications may be more than just a laboratory curiosity," D. J. Gauthier at Duke University wrote in a commentary on the findings. ------------------------------------------------------------ David Honig Orbit Technology honig@otc.net Intaanetto Jigyoubu If you plan to enter text which our system might consider to be obscene, check here to certify that you are old enough to hear the resulting output. http://www.bell-labs.com/project/tts/voices.html