Chaos harnessed for encryption / Fluctuations and Order research

[gnu () toad com <gnu () toad com>]

EE Times, Aug 9, 1993, p. 31 reports that "MIT's Research Lab of
Electronics is creating new signal processor designs, based on chaos
theory, that could open up a simple route to secure communications.

The new designs use a recent discovery called synchronized chaos to
transform a meaningful signal into what only seems to be random
noise., A similarly constructed receiver responds to the noisy signal,
sychronizing its own chaotic behaviour to extract the message.  The
MIT design requires only eight op-amps and is based on the Lorenz
attractor, which generates a simple three-dimensional chaotic system."

There's more, this is just a pointer.  Their current encryption system
is analog, not digital, and encrypts analog signals like audio; I
don't know if this is a fundamental design property or not.  They claim
it's not super-great encryption, just cheap and interesting.

Wired Sep/Oct 93 also reports (p.118) a Sep 9-12 conference on "Fluctuations
and Order" at Los Alamos National Labs' Center for Nonlinear Studies.
"The labs are gathering a couple dozen researchers who have realized
they can induce order into systems by using noise and randomness.  As
one abstract says, `The addition of noise to certain types of driven
systems can paradoxically cause a signal to become clearer.'"  These
seem related, to me.

        John