[6807] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: New York teen-ager win $100,000 with encryption research(3/14/2000)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ben Laurie)
Thu Mar 16 16:30:03 2000
Message-ID: <38D11843.6F2212DE@algroup.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 17:22:11 +0000
From: Ben Laurie <ben@algroup.co.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: "Arnold G. Reinhold" <reinhold@world.std.com>
Cc: Eugene Leitl <eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>, koontz@ariolimax.com,
cryptography@c2.net
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
"Arnold G. Reinhold" wrote:
>
> 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.
This is the attack I suggested to the guys who published in Nature.
Their plan was to change the codons for each message, but I felt that
you could still probe for stretches of DNA containing codons of the
form, say, ABCABC and ABCDEF but not DEFDEF (i.e. ABC -> 'e' and DEF ->
'a'), and so forth.
Cheers,
Ben.
--
SECURE HOSTING AT THE BUNKER: http://www.thebunker.net/hosting.htm
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html
Coming to ApacheCon Europe? http://ApacheCon.Com/
