On Wed, 20 Apr 1994 wcs@anchor.ho.att.com wrote:

...

All this "encryption with chaos" stuff just adds up to "look at my fancy PRNG", which of course is a game that crypto people have been playing for a long time. I'm starting to get alarm bells go off every time "chaos" is mentioned.

Yeah. On the other hand, chaotic stuff like Mandelbrot and Julia sets are good for generating lots of pretty pictures to hide steganography under, as long as you leave out the coordinates you're generating from.

I think even still it would be unwise to steno anything into a picture that is mathematically generated. A picture such as a scanned one, or perhaps another less rigid graphic would be a better idea. It may only be a small difference that it makes, but if your playing for keeps, well you know. The talk of chaos etc.. usually peeves me sometimes because it has turned into a buzzword really. Be careful what you call chaotic, cause it could be something else just buzzed into that category. Hmm actually a chaotic attractor would be detrimental to a PRNG, so at best maybe it's a good idea to stay away from functions that are porven to have attractors sicne your random numbers would be drawn in. one example I can think of is the Ikeda attractor. It's incredibly complex and you can never tell where the next iteration will pop up, BUT you always no it's inside the attractor, that is after you throw out the first few iteration while it is pulled in. I am taking acourse in Chaos Theory this semester, and I'll be sure to ask the prof about this application. You're eqipped with a hundred billion nueron brain, that's wired and fired, and it's a reality generating device, but you've got too do it. Free youself ----Tim Leary----