🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <gH2JsB7w165w@works.uucp>, hacker@works.uucp (DamDum) writes:
> lou@Cadence.COM (Louis K. Scheffer) writes:
> 
>> 
>> While pondering the well known problem of DES cracking via exhaustive
>> key search, I started wondering if you could apply genetic engineering to
>> the problem.  It seems like it may be possible.
>> 
>> The basic approach would be to build a bacteria that acts as a DES key search
>> machine.  Each bacteria generates keys at random, decrypts the encrypted bloc
>> with the key, and compares the result with the plaintext.  If there is a matc
>> it generates lots of a string of DNA that contains the key and a specific
>> marker that binds to an antibody, and excretes the result.  Otherwise it
>> just keeps trying keys.
>> 


Isn't one feature of genetic algorithms that they operate on a problem 
space that isn't flat.  That is, I fail to see how there can be any 
'goodness' test here except success or failure of a key to decode 
ciphertext into sensible output.  This would seem to reduce the 
idea to a variant of exhaustive search.  [This assumes that keys close to 
the correct key do not provide any information to the attacker as to their 
closeness (which is true of DES isn't it?).]

John Garland
jgarland@kean.ucs.mun.ca