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From: David Farber <dave@farber.net> Date: March 20, 2009 9:27:32 AM GMT-04:00 To: "ip" <ip@v2.listbox.com> Subject: [IP] Re: The emerging science of DNA cryptography

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From: Ted Nelson <tandm@xanadu.net> Date: March 20, 2009 4:52:31 AM EDT To: dave@farber.net Cc: Ted Nelson <tandm@xanadu.net> Subject: Re: [IP] Re: The emerging science of DNA cryptography Reply-To: tandm@xanadu.net

Better be well-contained. There's no knowing what infectious agents might be generated accidentally. Get a few drops of this in your bloodstream and one of the coded messages might be a new plague, which you pass on to others before it kills you. (Even if the message

Ted

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 8:47 PM, David Farber <dave@farber.net> wrote:

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From: dewayne@warpspeed.com (Dewayne Hendricks) Date: March 18, 2009 11:19:49 AM EDT To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy@warpspeed.com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The emerging science of DNA cryptography

The emerging science of DNA cryptography If DNA computing can be used to break codes, then the machinery of life can be exploited to encrypt data too Wednesday, March 18, 2009 <http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23167/> Molecular biologists have long thought of DNA as an information storage device. The body processes this information with an impressive array of computing machinery which, since the 1990s, we've exploited to carry out a few of our own calculations.

DNA computing may not be fast but it is massively parallel. With the right kind of setup, it has the potential to solve huge mathematical problems. It's hardly surprising then, that DNA computing represents a serious threat to various powerful encryption schemes such as the Data Encryption Standard (DES).

But if DNA can be used to break codes then it can also be exploited to encrypt data. Various groups have suggested using the sequence of nucleotides in DNA (A for 00, C for 01, G for 10, T for 11) for just this purpose. One idea is to not even bother encrypting the information but simply burying it in the DNA so it is well hidden, a technique called DNA steganography.

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