Re: Fractal cryptography

[Matthew J Ghio <mg5n+@andrew.cmu.edu>]

"Perry E. Metzger" <pmetzger@lehman.com> wrote:

> Amateurs regularly develop systems and claim fantastic things for
> them. They then turn out to be trivial to break. This has made people
> who are even semi-pro like some of the folks on this list shake their
> heads and say "oh no, not another one" every time someone who hasn't
> read the literature claims to have come up with "the new great
> cryptosystem". This is the reason that people tend to be so skeptical
> of the constant stream of new proposals from such individuals. Its
> nothing personal -- its just the sort of jaded attitude you get when
> this sort of thing happens repeatedly.

This is true.  If you were specifically referring to the example I
posted, it could probably be broken from the data presented if you
really put your mind to it.  However it is a fairly clever PRNG, and it
takes quite a bit of data to get the exact pattern.

It might not be feasible to create a cryptosystem using fractals and
chaos functions, but I think the possibility could be explored a bit
further...