Jeff Bone <jbone@jump.net> wrote:
>
> Some guy at Hahvahd is poking at this, too.
>From the IP list:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/20/science/20CODE.html
A computer science professor at Harvard says he has found a
way to send coded messages that cannot be deciphered, even by
an all-powerful adversary with unlimited computing power. And,
he says, he can prove it. [...]
In essence, the researcher, Dr. Michael Rabin and his Ph.D.
student Yan Zong Bing, have discovered a way to make a code
based on a key that vanishes even as it is used. While they
are not the first to have thought of such an idea, Dr. Rabin
says that never before has anyone been able to make it both
workable and to prove mathematically that the code cannot be
broken. [...]
For now, Dr. Rabin's idea is simply a scheme backed up by a
mathematical proof that he has been presenting to scientists
at seminars. No company is lurking in the background to sell
it, and Dr. Rabin says he has no commercial interests in it.
"I never commercialize anything," Dr. Rabin said. "I am not in
that business." Instead, he said, he did the work because it
was a challenge. [...]
The coding starts with a continuously generated string of
random numbers, say from a satellite put up to broadcast them
or from some other source. The numbers can be coming by at an
enormous speed - 10 million million per second, for example.
The sender of a message and its recipient agree to start
plucking a sequence of numbers from that string. They may
agree, for example, to send a message, encoded with any of
today's publicly available encryption systems saying "start"
and giving instructions on capturing certain of the random
numbers. As they capture the numbers, the sender uses them to
encode a message, and the recipient uses the numbers to decode
it.
An eavesdropper can know the mathematical formula used to
encode and decode, but without knowing the exact sequence of
random numbers that were used in the formula to send a
particular message, the eavesdropper cannot decode the
message. And the only way to have that sequence is to just
happen to be storing numbers from the unending stream at
exactly the right moment.
If the eavesdropper, for example, had a secret way to decode
the message saying "start" and it took a minute to do the
calculation needed to decode it, it would be too late by the
time the eavesdropper got going. The sender and recipient
would already have their string of numbers and that string of
numbers, once broadcast, could never be retrieved. It would be
infeasible to store the endless string of numbers in any
computer and so they are essentially gone forever.
Often, Dr. Rabin said, eavesdroppers will capture and store
encoded messages hoping to decode them at later, either when
computers have improved - making it easier to do the
calculations to break a code - or when the method for encoding
and decoding is known, perhaps because it has been stolen.
But, he said, messages encoded with his system can never be
broken by these means because the random numbers used in
encoding and decoding are used once and are never stored. [...]
[presumably the recipient of the message has to cache the random
numbers for a time in order to decode the message, in which case that
cache is a weak point; the article assumes the cache doesn't exist]
Tony.
-- f.a.n.finch fanf@covalent.net dot@dotat.at VIKING NORTH UTSIRE SOUTH UTSIRE NORTHEAST FORTIES: WEST VEERING NORTHWEST 5 TO 7, PERHAPS GALE 8 LATER. RAIN THEN SHOWERS. MODERATE BECOMING GOOD.
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