What we need to do now is harness DNA's ability to reproduce itself. Imagine, a circuit that can actually change it's physical wiring to handle new conditions and/or optimize itself...
The actual algorithm has been available to anyone interested for as long as I can remeber. In fact, it was taught to me in one of my second-year computer engineering courses. In fact, this website here gives you the math behind the algorithm:
http://world.std.com/~franl/crypto/rsa-guts.html
Basically, you give someone two numbers, E and (P*Q), which they use to encrypt your message. It can only be decrypted using a number which you have kept to yourself, D, and the base, (P*Q).
The process of cracking a particular set of keys means factoring (P*Q) into P and Q, from which it is easy to calculate D from E, and thus decrypt a message. The challenge is in the factoring. Both P and Q are primes, and if they are 128bit numbers, it takes a lot of computational horsepower to do that.
A fairly new encryption scheme is also available, using a public key method, called elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). With this method, the challenge is in solving discrete logarithms, much more difficult computationally than factoring primes.
Slashdot Mirror
What we need to do now is harness DNA's ability to reproduce itself. Imagine, a circuit that can actually change it's physical wiring to handle new conditions and/or optimize itself...
The actual algorithm has been available to anyone interested for as long as I can remeber. In fact, it was taught to me in one of my second-year computer engineering courses. In fact, this website here gives you the math behind the algorithm:
http://world.std.com/~franl/crypto/rsa-guts.html
Basically, you give someone two numbers, E and (P*Q), which they use to encrypt your message. It can only be decrypted using a number which you have kept to yourself, D, and the base, (P*Q). The process of cracking a particular set of keys means factoring (P*Q) into P and Q, from which it is easy to calculate D from E, and thus decrypt a message. The challenge is in the factoring. Both P and Q are primes, and if they are 128bit numbers, it takes a lot of computational horsepower to do that. A fairly new encryption scheme is also available, using a public key method, called elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). With this method, the challenge is in solving discrete logarithms, much more difficult computationally than factoring primes.