[comp.ai] Cryptology and Neural Networks?

jscosta@cod.NOSC.MIL (Joseph S. Costa) (02/18/88)

     Has anyone out there heard of any attempts to apply the fledgling concept of neural networks to cryptology?  I know that neurals are found to be quite nicefor handling pattern-recognition problems, so the pair would seem a natural     marriage to me.

     JSC

ln63wgq@sdcc13.ucsd.EDU (Keith Messer) (02/19/88)

Yea, Jeff Elman here at UCSD tried to apply neural nets to both the enigma
and DES, and I believe the problem was that the encryption algorithms are
simply too complex.  The neural net ends up memorizing the key-cyphertext
pairs you give it, but fails to come up with a good rule for learning new
pairs.  I wouldn't discount neural nets for cryptology but they haven't been
useful for straight known-plaintext decryption.

						Keith