Re: biological systems and cryptography

[Michael Cardenas]

I see that you're entirely correct. I've read about half of Scheiner's applied cryptography, and I'm familiar with the fact that current algorithms' strength is based on factoring large primes, and familiar with his estimates of 10^11 years for a 112 bit key, (given the caveat of no new scifi computing technology, from his book). And actually, in the chapter on key length he talks about biologocai systems and even about thermodynamics and computing machines in space that capture the energy of supernovas, giving a rather powerful upper bound, given that computation is bound by the laws of space and thermodynamics.

So, do you think that there are enough feasilbe research topics in cryptography to do graduate research in it, today? It seems that most of the work to be done is application, or solving the reimann zeta function and determining how primes come about.

Tim May wrote:

On Wednesday, January 1, 2003, at 08:55  PM, Michael Cardenas wrote:

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?

You know not whereof you speak.

Breaking RSA or similar systems is very, very, very strongly believed to be related to, for example, factoring large numbers. Hill-climbing and landscape-learning algorithms are of no use.

I said this in my last message.

Rather that you reading up on how such ciphers work so as to see immediately the content of what I said, you resort to the "Are you saying that you think that current cyphers are unbreakable?" chestnut.

Yes, if by breakable we are excluding brute force factoring, mathematical breakthroughs that are "deep" (and unexpected) and which have nothing to do with dumb hill-climbing, or some application of Shor's algorithm with quantum computers.

Give it up. Neural nets, simulated annealing, support vector machines, etc. are not going to factor a 1000-digit number.

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

I talked about this as well. You need to learn about what strong ciphers are.

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.

What if magic wands exist? What if time machines send the decrypted message backward in time?

--Tim May

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michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer
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