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"Lattices May Put Security Codes on a Firmer Footing," by Barry Cipra. Science, 23 August 1996, page 1047.
Computer security experts have developed techniques for protecting electronic communications through the use of cryptographic codes that are hard to crack. Unfortunately, these techniques offer no guarantees beyond the assumption that a would-be code-breaker would lack the necessary time and computing power. Is there a way to provide some mathematical guarantee of the "hardness" of cracking these codes? This article discusses the work of Miklos Ajtai, a mathematician at IBM Almaden Research Center, who has come up with new idea that does provides such a guarantee. His is a mathematical result, not an actual cryptographic device, so the practical implications of his work have yet to be worked out. However, some of the experimental results are encouraging.
-Allyn Jackson
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