"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/
