[4873] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: personal encryption? (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marc Horowitz)
Thu Jun 10 19:20:43 1999
From: Marc Horowitz <marc@mit.edu>
To: "Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold@world.std.com>
Cc: William Knowles <erehwon@kizmiaz.dis.org>, cryptography@c2.net
Date: 10 Jun 1999 16:55:38 -0400
In-Reply-To: "Arnold G. Reinhold"'s message of "Thu, 10 Jun 1999 15:24:07 -0400"
"Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold@world.std.com> writes:
>> It seems to me that you could use the DNA encodings for common words like
>> "the" and "and" as a marker for PCR. A soop of such initiators, followed by
>> a gel for the longest fragments should crack this code quickly. You might
>> need a second "backwards" PCR step to recover the very begining of the
>> message.
So you encrypt the message before DNA encoding it. If the scientist's
assertions are accurate, just include the key alongside the
ciphertext. Then you have no known text to PCR for. If you have a
key distribution mechanism in place, then use that instead, and even
if they do manage to find your message, they can't decrypt it.
Of course, this DNA system is just yet another way to to
stegonography, so all the techniques for doing stego well apply here,
too.
Marc
