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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:16:27 ADT
Bruce Schneier (schneier@counterpane.com)
Tue, 31 Mar 1998 17:31:18 -0600
This reads a whole lot like snake oil. I have seen several attempts to
use physics in an attempt to recreate cryptography, and generally
they are bogus. This is not to say that quantum crypto is nonsense,
but it is the exception.
At 09:10 AM 3/31/98 -0600, William H. Geiger III wrote:
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>Does anyone have any opinions on this?
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>- -----------------------------------------------------------------
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> HOLOCOMM: Secrecy by Delocalization
>
>
>Campinas, March 30th, 1998 -- Dr. Ed Gerck announced today a new digital
>communication and encoding system that uses quantum mechanical principles
>to provide for data privacy and reliability, called Holocomm. As one of
>its main characteristics, information encoded with Holocomm becomes fully
>delocalized and can be read only with the proper decoding parameters. This
>affords a holographic property: any part of the encoded information can be
>used to recover the whole information to a degree.
>
>The encoded information can be static, as in a certificate, e-mail
>message, contract, etc, or dynamic, as in a real-time communication
>channel.
>
>Holocomm is neither cryptography nor steganography, even though both share
>properties with it. It is not cryptography because the encoded information
>cannot be localized. It is not steganography because it does not depend
>on another information to hide the original information, while it can use
>another information such as an image, if so desired. It can provide strong
>security as with cryptography while keeping the data hidden as with
>steganography. Moreover, since the information is delocalized but not
>merged, no part of it can be removed without removing the message itself
>while any part of it can reproduce the message to a degree, which has no
>parallel in cryptography or steganography.
>
>"Holocomm fully delocalizes information, while strongly encoding it.
>Delocalization means that all information syntax is free from the
>limitations of locality, while all information semantics is transformed
>into a global property. Thus, delocalization is not a loss of identity
>but an omnipresence of it, for each part of the message. A Holocomm
>message is a macro quantum mechanical wave packet, where information is
>not stored in specific places, like characters in a plaintext, bits in an
>encrypted message, bytes in a data packet or as a time-dependent signal in
>a modulated-carrier wave system, but is effectively distributed as an
>indivisible property of the wave packet as a whole. Then, documents become
>truly holographic in the sense that a rather small part of a document can
>be verified to afford origin authentication of the entire document. Even
>data integrity authentication for the whole document can be derived from a
>small sample, to a degree. Holocomm documents can also be smaller in size
>than the original documents." explains Dr. Gerck.
>
>Regarding its strong encoding techniques, Holocomm can be a carrier for
>any known encryption system such as RSA, DES, Idea, Blowfish, RC4, etc. or
>for its own secure quantum mixing and encoding modes. "Holocomm can
>interoperate with known, tried and secure encryption techniques while also
>offering new avenues for strong data privacy that can become vitally
>crucial, for example, if integer factorization suddenly becomes viable for
>large key sizes. Further, as world e-commerce needs are in opposition to
>export controlled cryptography, Holocomm offers secure and open
>alternatives -- now." declares Dr. Gerck.
>
>Holocomm allows several problems to be solved, that have either no
>solution or only partial and difficult solutions. For example:
>
>- - diverse encodings and media: Holocomm can produce messages with any
>transport encoding, such as Base-64, ASCII, binary, etc. and for any media
>such as e-mail, WWW, voice, film, etc.
>
>- - resistant transport: MIME or ASCII-armor may not be necessary in the
>majority of cases for e-mail because text which is privacy encoded and/or
>signed in a Holocomm system can be recovered to a large degree even when
>mangled by mail transport systems. Localized errors can be compensated
>because the transported information is delocalized.
>
>- - digital signature recovery: today's digital signature systems need an
>integral and errorless copy of both the document and the signature. With
>Holocomm, even rather small parts of a document can allow the document's
>origin authentication to be verified with negligible error, also providing
>for data integrity authentication of the whole document, to a degree.
>This recuperates a 3D-world property legally known as a "holograph" (not
>to be confused with hologram) and which was entirely lost for digital
>signatures.
>
>- - digital signature legislation: by allowing the usual legal concept of a
>holograph to be applied for digital signatures, Holocomm reduces the risk
>of document repudiation, tampering, etc. Since the data and its signature
>become securely intermingled, the signature is not localized and cannot
>even be separated from the document --
>making the digitally signed document akin to a document wholly in the
>handwriting of the author.
>
>- - strong transparency: A Holocomm message may be strongly encrypted and
>yet such encryption may be undetectable within Complexity Theory limits,
>when Holocomm works in privacy-transparent mode.
>
>- - resistant encryption: a Holocomm message that uses its own quantum
>encoding modes can resist tampering attempts that may try to change it or
>render it unreadable or unusable.
>
>- - Intrinsic Certification: Since quantum packets can be added without
>loosing their identity, Holocomm allows independent secure multichannel
>messages to be transported in the same certificate or message, offering
>new tools to implement the Intrinsic Certification method being developed
>by the MCG -- Meta-Certificate Group. Dr. Gerck has granted the MCG
>worldwide rights to apply Holocomm in the MCG developments and APIs.
>
>- - mandatory key-escrow: Holocomm can use Intrinsic Certification to allow
>independency from CAs and TTPs, thus being legally independent of any
>key-escrow or key-control legislation that may be imposed on CAs and TTPs.
>
>- - privacy encumbering: Holocomm allows its privacy modes to be
>undetectable within Complexity Theory limits, thus rendering useless any
>attempt to encumber privacy. The same applies for certification
>encumbering, by allowing undetectable Intrinsic Certification.
>
>- - rights management: Holocomm allows a non-invasive, indelible and secure
>stamp to be applied to copyrighted materials such as software, ..gif or
>.jpg images, text, film, music, video, voice, etc.
>
>- - e-commerce: by providing for strong document non-repudiation, secure
>signatures, privacy and independent secure multichannels, Holocomm closely
>resembles traditional legal documents used in age-old commerce, which can
>be hand annotated and signed by several parties, all independently
>targeting any desired portion of one document, without any need to expose
>the document to a notary (eg, a CA or TTP) in order to achieve security.
>
>- - product and environmental security: Holocomm can securely store complex
>chemical fingerprints of products (such as crude oil) and allow undeniable
>product tracing and identification. Thus,
>commercial and environmental aspects of different chemicals and products
>can be securely certified to combat tampering, contraband, unidentified
>spillovers and environmental damage. The same can be applied to complex
>animal or plant biometric-data and other identity-
>or capability-related data.
>
>- - cross-delocalized data: Holocomm allows for a set of data to be
>delocalized in different places and not just in one place, i.e.
>cross-delocalized data. This can be useful to implement secure fail-safe
>procedures because not all data have to be accessible all the time.
>
>- - export free: Holocomm was entirely developed to be export-free for any
>degree of privacy and security. It can be freely exported and re-exported
>to any country in the world. Holocomm does not depend on any other
>patented system.
>
>
>Holocomm can be applied now to worldwide security applications.
>Companies, individuals and investors are invited to contact Dr. Ed Gerck
>at egerck@novaware.cps.softex.br in order to discuss proposals:
>
> "The opportunity is now open for any interested party to lead or
> participate in commercial efforts that may deploy Holocomm in
> applications that can profit from origin authentication, data
> integrity authentication, privacy, security, non-repudiation
> properties, encryption transparency, resistant encryption,
> product security, etc."
>
>The Holocomm system can and will be fully disclosed to the public, as its
>security rests on freely chosen encoding/decoding parameters with strong
>computing penalties to prevent parameter-space search, not on method
>secrecy. The need to follow patent legislation procedures clearly prevents
>a full disclosure at this moment but a technical summary is provided
>below.
>
>
>
>REFERENCES:
>
>Dr. rer. nat. Ed Gerck is the CTO of Novaware
>(http://novaware.cps.softex.br), Coordinator of the Internet open group
>MCG (http://www.mcg.org.br) that has representatives from 25 countries and
>visiting Professor at UNICAMP, Brazil.
>
>The Holocomm system is derived as a combination of free-standing and/or
>bound-state wave packets in a large quantum mechanical system that works
>as a thermal bath, which provides for the necessary state mixing and
>strongly penalizes parameter-space search. Holocomm depends on concepts
>published by the author more than 15 years ago [1] [2], when the question
>of how to represent quantum states in a fully analytical form was shown to
>be solvable with high accuracy also as a function of a reduced
>representation of the quantum mechanical equation itself and not only as a
>function of a reduced representation of the wave functions for the full
>equation.
>
>
>[1] E. Gerck et. al., "Solution of the Schroedinger equation for bound
>states in closed form", Phys. Rev. A, vol. 26, p. 662, 1982.
>
>[2] E. Gerck et. al., "Scaling laws for Rydberg atoms in magnetic fields",
>Phys. Rev. Lett., vol.50, p.324, 1983.
>
>
>This document is hereby released for public information, which does not
>constitute a right to use such information for any other purpose or for a
>product. Republication is allowed with copyright and author citation. The
>Holocomm system, and the "Holocomm" name are Copyright (c) Ed Gerck, 1998.
>All rights reserved worldwide. Patent
>applications reserved worldwide.
>
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>- --
>- ---------------------------------------------------------------
>William H. Geiger III http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii
>Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0
>
>Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
>PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail.
>OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii/esecure.html
>- ---------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Tag-O-Matic: I smashed a Window and saw... OS/2.
>
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**********************************************************************
Bruce Schneier, President, Counterpane Systems Phone: 612-823-1098
101 E Minnehaha Parkway, Minneapolis,MN 55419 Fax: 612-823-1590
http://www.counterpane.com
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:16:27 ADT