[66172] in Cypherpunks
Re: Evolving algorithm for faster brute force key searches?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Adam Shostack)
Sun Sep 22 22:30:42 1996
From: Adam Shostack <adam@homeport.org>
To: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 22:14:00 -0500 (EST)
Cc: coderpunks@toad.com, cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <ae6af5030202100433cd@[207.167.93.63]> from "Timothy C. May" at Sep 22, 96 06:41:13 am
Timothy C. May wrote:
| With some weak ciphers, this might work. I think Schneier makes some
| comments about who's looked at this. But weak ciphers are not too
| interesting.
At the most recent Crypto, someone mentioned that FEAL is
useful because just about any new attack you can think of works well
against it. I think it was Susan Langford.
Weak systems are thus useful for research and training
purposes. I suspect Tim is on the money with a genetic algorithim
having a flat `fitness landscape,' but there may be something that a
human misses which an evolved algorithim finds.
Also, it may be possible to evolve something against a
reduced round version of a cipher (using a training space that is not
flat) that will still work better than brute force against a full
system. If you have cycles to spare, it might be an interesting
avenue of research.
Adam
--
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
-Hume
