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"Nearly Unbreakable" Encryption Scheme Inspired By Human Biology
rjmarvin (3001897) writes "Researchers at the U.K.'s Lancaster University have reimagined the fundamental logic behind encryption, stumbling across a radically new way to encrypt data while creating software models to simulate how the human heart and lungs coordinate rhythms. The encryption method published in the American Physical Society journal and filed as a patent entitled 'Encoding Data Using Dynamic System Coupling,' transmits and receive multiple encrypted signals simultaneously, creating an unlimited number of possibilities for the shared encryption key and making it virtually impossible to decrypt using traditional methods. One of the researchers, Peter McClintock, called the encryption scheme 'nearly unbreakable.'
Every intelligence everywhere can invent an encryption scheme it can't break.
Don't ever use any crypto algorithm the experts haven't been attacking and publishing about for a while.
The keyword here is nearly, which means it can be broken.
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Not that I've actually done my own research, but what qualifications do these folks have to state the security of an encryption mechanism? Everybody who finds a new way to twist a message thinks it's secure.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
TFA contains no actual information, just an assertion that the interaction between poorly-described models of "biological" systems might kinda possibly maybe make them money because the world needs car door key fobs, or something like that.
Deep.
It should link here:http://www.sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=69025&page=1 Yeah, if you could fix it, that would be greaaaat.
Red flag #1 publication to inappropriate forum. If your "breakthrough" in physics only got published in the Journal of English as a Foreign Language, it's most likely bunk. Likewise then, if you've got some crypto results and the best place you could find to publish them was a physics journal, that's a bad sign. There are journals about crypto. If this wasn't sent to them it means nobody serious has looked at this. If it was sent and they declined it means serious people laughed their heads off.
Red flag #2 use of phrase "nearly unbreakable" which doesn't mean anything. Anybody who knew what the hell they were talking about would steer clear of that phrase, but oh my, if you're clueless it sounds impressive. So, probably clueless then.
I don't know whether or not this idea actually works, or what level of security it may or may not provide, but it's addressing an already thoroughly-solved problem. It appears to provide a symmetric key cipher, which means -- regardless of how radical the approach may or may not be -- it's in direct competition with algorithms like AES and the multitude of other well-respected and heavily-researched block and stream ciphers. The abstract and summary mention "an unlimited number of possibilities for a shared encryption key", but existing algorithms already provide enormous key spaces.
Of course, some cryptanalytic breakthrough could provide a way to break all existing ciphers, but who's to say the same breakthrough wouldn't impact systems based on this idea. And, actually, we already have another approach which uses special hardware at each end, Quantum Cryptography, which can absolutely guarantee security, unless our understanding of the Uncertainty Principle is wrong. Or unless there are bugs in the physical implementation, which there have been, and I see no reason that this "Dynamic Systems Coupling" approach wouldn't be subject to the same kinds of problems.
So... meh.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Anyone can invent an encryption scheme so clever that he or she can't think of a way to break it.
The author's claim that it's very hard to break only means that THEY don't know how to break it. That's meaningless, because anyone and everyone can come up with a puzzle they don't know how to solve. That doesn't mean it's hard, just that they don't know how it's done.
A trivial example would be a kindergartener who might observe that if you encode a message by writing it with letters, they don't kow how to read that message. That's only because the kid doesn't know how to read. It in no way suggests that reading is impossible. For many Slashdot readers, compiling a message into a Windows resource file makes unreadable _to_them. Windows resource files are of course quite easy to read, if you know how. These researchers don't know how to read their own encoding. So what? That doesn't mean _I_ don't know how to read their stuff.
Their scheme does have one attribute that's good - it can generate long keys. So can a random number generator. They MAY have a good idea, but we won't know until alot of other people try to break their encryption and fail.
There's nothing in the protocol description about key sharing. If you already have a way to share keys, why not just use a one time pad that's proven to be unbreakable?
I'm calling bullshit.
I sense an underlying ambiguity in your message here, even with a common scent profile wafting between subject and comment...
Are you suggesting someone has perhaps fabricated something that one would compare to bovine fecal matter for the sake of pure attention whoring?
Why my good friend, I've never heard of such a thing. On the internet you say...
The paper contains none of the cryptographic analysis necessary to show that this is a secure cryptographic system. It's just another one of these "let's take a chaotic dynamical system and use it for cryptography" papers.
The paper doesn't tell you much about cryptography, but it does illustrate the failures of peer review.
From the abstract it seems that they are claiming:
1) Boy, those chaotic systems look complex.
2) Gee they can synchronize
3) If we superimpose other chaotic systems on top, then it looks even more complexer.
So something like Walsh codes implemented badly. Walsh codes have nothing to do with cryptography btw.
What they haven''t shown is a lower bound for brute for attack complexity, or why it is resistant to any of the normal attack methods. I don't see why an imposter could not sync to the source the same way the intended recipient does. From the paper, I see several linear systems of equations describing the chaotic oscillators.
This will fall fast when a real cryptographer has go at it.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
"Climate change" is not a "downgrade" to global warming. It's simply better wording to avoid denial from idiots who don't understand math (i.e. means) and say "wow it's really cold this winter, global warming is bs!" Nothing has changed; we still know the mean temperature is increasing and that the increase is caused by human activity. But the new wording is less susceptible to idiotic misinterpretation.
OK, first bypass the click troll and get to the actual paper.
The general idea seems to be to transmit a large amount of noisy data per plaintext bit. Historically, crypto schemes which make the input much bigger are disfavored, but communications bandwidth is cheaper now and that might be OK.
The author of the paper seems to have fallen into the old trap of thinking that that analog signals have infinite amounts of data in them. He writes things like ''The encrypting key space is unbounded." and "The choice of the form of coupling functions comes from a set of functions that is not bounded." ("High-end" audio people also fall for this.) In reality, at some point you hit a noise threshold, and, anyway, down at the bottom, electrons and photons are discrite. Also, to be usable, whatever is used for the key has to be of finite size, and preferably not too big.
"No new cypher is worth looking at unless it comes from someone who has already broken a very hard one. - Friedman.
Having a look at the paper, I can absolutely see that the encryption technique seems on the face of it to exceed computable solution. What I would need to be convinced about is the integrity of the communication; is what you get at the end of it guaranteed to be perfectly reflective of what you put into it?
(I can also see a sketch proof to the effect that the overall system can be made reliable with a probability approaching 1 - for arbitrarily small , but that's macroscopic behaviour. Microscopic, the system looks like it's capable of handling very regular systems very well, but given the reliance on Bayesian inference will drop reliability for anything with some very likely inputs and some less likely outputs.)
Myu: