[6795] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: New York teen-ager win $100,000 with encryption research
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Arnold G. Reinhold)
Wed Mar 15 19:54:38 2000
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Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2000 17:27:25 -0500
To: Eugene Leitl <eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>, koontz@ariolimax.com
From: "Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold@world.std.com>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
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At 7:39 PM -0800 3/14/2000, Eugene Leitl wrote:
>Of course it ain't actual encryption, only (high-payload)
>steganography at best. Now, if you sneak a message into a living
>critter (a pet ("the message is the medium"), or creating the ultimate
>self-propagating chainletter, a pathogen), that would be an
>interesting twist.
>
>Interesting is that you can tag the message with a longish
>pseudorandom base sequence, which allows you to fish for the fragment
>(from digests) via a complementary sequence. Anyone not in posession
>of that sequence would have to do a total sequencing.
If you know the DNA sequences of alphabet letters, you can PCR probe
for common words or word fragments like "the" or "ing" and avoid
total sequencing.
>
>Of course, using real steganography (camouflaging messages in DNA
>(say, "(c) by God, Inc.") as genes or ballast as highly repetitive
>sequences) is also an option.
A recent Genetic Engineering News says the price for synthetic DNA is
dropping from $1 per base to about $0.50 per base. That works out to
$0.25 per bit. That's about 8 orders of magnitude more expensive than
PC disk storage.
>David G. Koontz writes:
> > http://www.sjmercury.com/svtech/news/breaking/merc/docs/013955.htm
Arnold Reinhold
