On Sep 27, 2010, at 9:11 28PM, Jon Callas wrote:
>
> On Sep 26, 2010, at 6:14 PM, Steven Bellovin wrote:
>
>> Does anyone know of any ciphers where bits of keys modify the control path,
>> rather than just data operations? Yes, I know that that's a slippery
>> concept, since ultimately things like addition and multiplication can be
>> implemented with loops in the hardware or firmware. I also suspect that
>> it's potentially dangerous, since it might create very hard-to-spot classes
>> of weak keys. The closest I can think of is SIGABA, where some of the
>> keying controlled the stepping of the other rotors.
>
> If you remember (or even read) Dan Brown's mid-late-'90s novel, "Digital
> Fortress," in which the MacGuffin was an unbreakable cipher, I was amused
> when I read it that Brown blurred the difference between code and data. The
> keys in Brown's cipher were both data and self-modifying instructions in some
> virtual machine. It didn't make sense in the way that software actually
> works, but this made the cipher some weird cross between crypto and a
> polymorphic virus. It was plain in the description that he'd gotten a little
> knowledge about each and combined them to create a dangerous thing.
>
> There have also been LFSR-type things that used some bits to control stepping
> of other things, a la SIGABA, but I think that Digital Fortress is the
> closest thing to what you want.
>
Someone else pointed out BassOMatic, in PGP 1.0, which is exactly what I was
looking for.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
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