[4876] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: personal encryption? (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ben Laurie)
Fri Jun 11 11:17:06 1999
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 10:42:17 +0100
From: Ben Laurie <ben@algroup.co.uk>
To: Marc Horowitz <marc@mit.edu>
Cc: "Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold@world.std.com>,
William Knowles <erehwon@kizmiaz.dis.org>, cryptography@c2.net
Marc Horowitz wrote:
>
> "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.
That's fine, and it gives you a working system. But it is not what they
were claiming.
Cheers,
Ben.
--
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