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

Use BWT instead of LZ for even more diffusion

[yerricde]

How does one hide messages in reandom noise, though? Would it work to LZ-compress them, to make them appear random?

LZ+Huffman (i.e. deflate, the core of gzip and pkzip) works, but you get more compression in a Burrows-Wheeler based scheme such as bzip2. More compression => more entropy per coded symbol => more resistance to known plaintext attacks.