I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I didn’t. I guess it could go with whatever intractable scientific problems currently require large computational brute-force approaches [1]: fluid dynamics (including combined free/forced convective heat transfer), protein folding, weather, electron wave functions, … .
The general approach would be:
1) Base a cipher on the difficult aspect of some scientific problem. 2) Publish the cipher. 3) Wait until someone finds a shortcut to decrypting the cipher without the private key. 4) Simplest explanation that fits the data!
Remaining problem: It’s not enough for a scientific problem to be difficult, it must have a trapdoor aspect to it: something that, for the entire problem class, makes it easy to solve if you know it. I’d have to think about how to get that to work for the one domain I’m most familiar with (fluid dynamics).
[1] I guess they’re not technically brute force, because they don’t try a bunch of solutions in parallel, but you have to do a lot of grind to find the solution that fits all the constraints.
The one which nagged at me was whether cryptographic methods would have been useful in deducing the periodic table. I have no idea whether they would have helped, but it’s a relatively simple pattern underlying a lot of data.
More generally, are there past problems where cryptographic methods would have helped?
Arguably, the entire history of classical astronomy is one big case of frequency analysis: people noticed the repeating patterns in the observable cosmos (ciphertext) to infer future positions of celestial bodies (the plaintext) and the relative period lengths to determine the relative positions of them all and our position/view direction within it (private key).
First, they noticed that light and dark cycle, and called those days. They noticed that moon phases and seasons cycle and came up with years and moon charts. They noticed “wanderers” like mars and venus, and the cycling of those observations led them to postulate future appearances and the kind of cosmos that would lead to our observations. And so on.
Do you have any scientific questions in mind which you think would be especially susceptible to cryptoanalysis?
I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I didn’t. I guess it could go with whatever intractable scientific problems currently require large computational brute-force approaches [1]: fluid dynamics (including combined free/forced convective heat transfer), protein folding, weather, electron wave functions, … .
The general approach would be:
1) Base a cipher on the difficult aspect of some scientific problem.
2) Publish the cipher.
3) Wait until someone finds a shortcut to decrypting the cipher without the private key.
4) Simplest explanation that fits the data!
Remaining problem: It’s not enough for a scientific problem to be difficult, it must have a trapdoor aspect to it: something that, for the entire problem class, makes it easy to solve if you know it. I’d have to think about how to get that to work for the one domain I’m most familiar with (fluid dynamics).
[1] I guess they’re not technically brute force, because they don’t try a bunch of solutions in parallel, but you have to do a lot of grind to find the solution that fits all the constraints.
The one which nagged at me was whether cryptographic methods would have been useful in deducing the periodic table. I have no idea whether they would have helped, but it’s a relatively simple pattern underlying a lot of data.
More generally, are there past problems where cryptographic methods would have helped?
Arguably, the entire history of classical astronomy is one big case of frequency analysis: people noticed the repeating patterns in the observable cosmos (ciphertext) to infer future positions of celestial bodies (the plaintext) and the relative period lengths to determine the relative positions of them all and our position/view direction within it (private key).
First, they noticed that light and dark cycle, and called those days. They noticed that moon phases and seasons cycle and came up with years and moon charts. They noticed “wanderers” like mars and venus, and the cycling of those observations led them to postulate future appearances and the kind of cosmos that would lead to our observations. And so on.