Optical Cryptography

chill writes: "In Cryptonomicon, Neil Stephenson wrote about Bell Labs' research into using static, or chaotic signals to mask communications. A message would be generated, then the signal masked in noise. Someone on the other end would subtract out the noise to get the signal. Works great if both ends have the exact same noise. Now, Jia-ming Liu, professor of electrical engineering at UCLA, is giving a presentation on doing essentially the same thing using OC-48 (2.5 Gbps) optical circuits. The presentation will be at the upcoming Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibit. There is an article covering this and some other nice advances in optical over in Wired."

Comments

Cryptonomicon

[andfarm]

Is it just me, or can almost any post on ./ be linked eventually to _Cryptonomicon_? Anything, for that matter?

Or is it just that I'm studying World War II?

DMCA

[IsaacW]

Great... now the RIAA/MPAA will be breathing down our necks for bypassing "noise-based-encryption" protection schemes every time we shield an audio or network cable...

OC-48

[ralian]

Right. And as soon as I get an OC-48 connection, I'll implement this.

Isn't this a bit like 2048-bit encryption? Sure it's a good idea, but the technology requirements are a bit excessive.

Didn't we see this somewhere before?

[Brendan Byrd]

Oh yeah...Johnny Mnemonic! Yeah, when he was picking random images for the data to encrypt it. I find it strange that something from such a mediocre movie gets to actually be applied as technology. (Then again, the whole point of the movie was its neat ideas.)

Why didn't somebody think of this before?

Slashdot

[Sivar]

Taco will be in a very difficult situation at his work if they remove unrestricted internet access...