New Chaos? John Gilmore wrote:

EE Times, Aug 9, 1993, p. 31 reports that "MIT's Research Lab of Electronics is creating new signal processor designs, based on chaos theory, that could open up a simple route to secure communications. ... The new designs use a recent discovery called synchronized chaos to transform a meaningful signal into what only seems to be random noise...

From my survey of spread-spectrum techniques, this 1950's approach to signal hiding is called a "Transmitted Reference." Random thermal noise in a resistor was transmitted in one band, and the same noise mixed with a message was sent in another. The receiver would take the

I saw something like this in the latest Scientific American, but is it new?? the difference between the two noisy signals to get the message. Although casual snoopers would be thwarted, the key is broadcast openly, therefore this should not be considered secure. Mix it with modern Stored Reference techniques like frequency-hopping, direct- sequence, and time-hopping and you might get a great hybrid system. Are there any freeware spread-spectrum designs, analogous to PGP, to solve the physical data communications problem? Encryption is great, but the phone company is enemy territory. bypass. Bypass. BYPASS!!!! Kent <jkhastings@aol.com>