Re: NYT: Chaotic Encryption: a Solution in Search of a Problem

["Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com>]

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On Sat, 6 Apr 1996, Dan Haskovec wrote:

> The New York Times online site reports on a researcher at Oak Ridge National
> Labs who "devised and patented a new mathematical system for encrypting and
> authenticating digital data, based on the scientific concept of chaos."  The
> article mention that people in industry were less than enthused about
> adopting it.  Even the inventor says that it "isn't robust enough for
> military applications."  It seems to use a chaotic system at both ends with
> a symmetric key.  It almost sounds like the NYT covered it because chaos is
> "cool", not because this development is significant.  Any insights?

There has been research into developing chaos based encryption, but none of
the systems developed are nearly as strong as block ciphers such as IDEA and
3DES.  Chaos encryption is more like steganography than encryption.
The chaos encryption schemes that I know of use a driving circuit to generate
the carrier wave for the transmission.  If a person on the other end knows the
driving circuit used, then that person can remove it.  The output of a chaos
encryption mechanism is similar to static, but I don't think that it is
particularly strong.  With proven strong encryption, the only advantage I can
see to using chaos encryption would be to encrypt analog data.

- -- Mark

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