At 02:17 PM 11/10/95 -0500, Atp3000@aol.com wrote:

I just resently got interested in coding and cryptography, and I was wondering if you could suggest 3 or 4 papers that adresses the aplication of neural networks in cryptography.

Schneier's 2nd edition says "Neural nets aren't terribly useful for cryptography, primarily because of the shape of the solution space. Neural nets work best for problems that have a continuity of solutions, some better than others. This allows a neural net to learn, proposing better and better solutions as it does. Breaking an algorithm provides for very little in the way of learning opportunities: You either recover the key or you don't. (At least this is true if the algorithm is any good.) Neural nets work well in structured environments when there is something to learn, but not in the high-entropy, seemingly random world of cryptography." And he doesn't give any references. That's been my opinion of the issue as well; I looked into it a bit when I was doing a project with the neural net folks back at Bell Labs, partly because neural net chips typically have lots and lots of parallel bit-sized horsepower. Unfortunately, the horsepower isn't arranged in ways that are very useful for crypto; adding together a large bunch of short chunks of data (maybe using floating point addition) and thresholding the sum isn't the right thing to do with highly discontinuous functions. You could take a similar chip design and connect the pieces together differently to make a brute-force searcher, i.e. take a gate array and wire it to do crypto-like calculations, but the neural net stuff doesn't do that very efficiently. #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0663 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281