more snake oil? [WAS: New uncrackable(?) encryption technique]

[Ed Gerck]

bear wrote:

> The implication is that they have a "hard problem" in their
> bioscience application, which they have recast as a cipher.

Their problem is not hard -- it is just either slow to converge for
some methods or not simply uniquely determined (*). They consider
the cases that are not uniquely determined, which is equivalent to the
following problem:

       given Y solve for X in Y = X mod 11

(and I mean 11 as a good number for their problem space),
which has many answers. Indeed, the number of answers (‘keys’)
that fit the equation is infinite. Since they know the only "X" that they
consider (quite arbitrarily) to be the "right" answer, they say that
you can't guess it -- hence it is unbreakable in their view. However,
their search space is very small and all functional exponential forms
can be tried in parallel with much better algorithms than what they
seem to use (*). This is not better than short passwords, so that one
probably does not even need to break in and snatch the file holding
the keys to the kingdom -- the coefficients that were used.

(*) For an example, see the Prony method comment and reference in  http://www-ee.stanford.edu/~siegman/Beams_and_resonators_2.pdf

Cheers,
Ed Gerck


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