bear wrote:
> The implication is that they have a "hard problem" in their > bioscience application, which they have recast as a cipher. Their problem is not hard -- it is just either slow to converge for some methods or not simply uniquely determined (*). They consider the cases that are not uniquely determined, which is equivalent to the following problem: given Y solve for X in Y = X mod 11 (and I mean 11 as a good number for their problem space), which has many answers. Indeed, the number of answers (‘keys’) that fit the equation is infinite. Since they know the only "X" that they consider (quite arbitrarily) to be the "right" answer, they say that you can't guess it -- hence it is unbreakable in their view. However, their search space is very small and all functional exponential forms can be tried in parallel with much better algorithms than what they seem to use (*). This is not better than short passwords, so that one probably does not even need to break in and snatch the file holding the keys to the kingdom -- the coefficients that were used. (*) For an example, see the Prony method comment and reference in http://www-ee.stanford.edu/~siegman/Beams_and_resonators_2.pdf Cheers, Ed Gerck --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]