biological systems and cryptography

[Michael Cardenas]

On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 12:23:51PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:41  AM, Michael Cardenas wrote:
>
> >How do you all see the future use of biologically based systems
> >affecting cryptography in general?
> >
> >By biologically based systems I mean machine learning, genetic
> >algorithms, chips that learn (like Carver Mead's work), neural
> >networks, vecor support machines, associative memory, etc.
>
> Strong crypto is, ipso facto, resistant to all of the above. For the
> obvious reason that the specific solution to a cipher is like a Dirac
> delta function (a spike) rising above a featureless plain, this in
> terms of the usual hill-climbing or landscape-learning models which all
> of the above use in one form or another.
>

People do break cyphers, by finding weaknesses in them. Are you saying
that you think that current cyphers are unbreakable?

Also, what about using biological systems to create strong cyphers,
not to break them?


> Cryptanalysis of weak crypto, in terms of mundane things like
> passphrase guessing, finding images tagged with stego code, etc.,
> already in some cases makes use of these tools. Bob Baldwin's
> Crytpographer's Workbench used learning algorithms a long time ago.
>
> Strong math wins out over weak crypto any day, and attempting to brute
> force a cipher with even a swimming pool full of Adleman machines will
> not work: if a 400-digit number takes, for instance, a million Pentium
> 4 years to brute force factor, then how long does a 600-digit number
> take?
>
> (And using larger RSA moduli is of course trivial...)
>
> Homework: Using the estimates Schneier, Diffie, Hellman, and others
> have made for the number of computer operations to break ciphers of
> various kinds, describe a reasonable cipher and modulus or key length
> which will take more energy than there is in the entire universe to
> break. The answer, in terms of how small the key or modulus is, may
> surprise you.
>

It seems that all of these analyses assume that an instruction is a
single mathematical operation in a turing machine. What if each
operation was something else? I refuse to believe that the human mind
is just a turing machine.


--
michael cardenas       | lead software engineer, lindows.com
hyperpoem.net          | GNU/Linux software developer
people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred

"It is as hard to see one's self as to look backwards without turning
around."
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