Plastic Surgery - Scientists hid encryption key for Wizard of Oz text in plastic molecules

[Lightwreather]

Summary

Scientists from the University of Texas at Austin sent a letter to colleagues in Massachusetts with a secret message: an encryption key to unlock a text file of the classic novel "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz". The interesting thing about this was that the encryption key was hidden in a special ink laced with polymers.

 

Quotes

Quote

This latest paper focused on the use of sequence-defined polymers (SDPs)  as a storage medium for encrypting a large data set. SDPs are basically long chains of monomers, each of which corresponds to one of 16 symbols. "Because they're a polymer with a very specific sequence, the units along that sequence can carry a sequence of information, just like any sentence carries information in the sequence of letters," co-author Eric Anslyn of UT told New Scientist.

But these macromolecules can't store as much information as DNA, per the authors, since the process of storing more data with each additional monomer becomes increasingly inefficient, making it extremely difficult to retrieve the information with the current crop of analytic instruments available. So short SDPs must be used, limiting how much data can be stored per molecule. Anslyn and his co-authors figured out a way to improve that storage capacity and tested the viability of their method.

First, Anslyn et al. used a 256-bit encryption key to encode Baum's novel into a polymer material made up of commercially available amino acids. The sequences were comprised of eight oligourethanes, each 10 monomers long. The middle eight monomers held the key, while the monomers on either end of a sequence served as placeholders for synthesis and decoding. The placeholders were "fingerprinted" using different isotope labels, such as halogen tags, indicating where each polymer's encoded information fit within the order of the final digital key,

Then they jumbled all the polymers together and used depolymerization and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC/MS) to "decode" the original structure and encryption key. The final independent test: They mixed the polymers into a special ink made of isopropanol, glycerol, and soot. They used the ink to write a letter to James Reuther at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Reuther's lab then extracted the ink from the paper and used the same sequential analysis to retrieve the binary encryption key, revealing the text file of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

In other words, Anslyn's lab wrote a message (the letter) containing another secret message (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) hidden in the molecular structure of the ink. There might be more pragmatic ways to accomplish the feat, but they successfully stored 256 bits in the SDPs, without using long strands. "This is the first time this much information has been stored in a polymer of this type," Anslyn said, adding that the breakthrough represents "a revolutionary scientific advance in the area of molecular data storage and cryptography."

 

My thoughts

Well, that was rather interesting. This seems like the obvious next step in terms of data storage and retrieval and I'll be looking forward to see how this progresses.

 

Sources

ArsTechnica

ACS Science (Research Paper)

NewScientist

University of Texas at Austin

[Bombastinator]

When I think plastic surgery I think boob jobs.  This makes for a rather disturbing mental picture.

[CTR640]

5 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

When I think plastic surgery I think boob jobs.  This makes for a rather disturbing mental picture.

Lmfao, exactly my thought

[wanderingfool2]

7 hours ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Well, that was rather interesting. This seems like the obvious next step in terms of data storage and retrieval and I'll be looking forward to see how this progresses.

It's unlikely to progress into anything practical.  All of these types of innovations require expensive equipment and likely human intervention at some steps to get them working.

 

It effectively has to compete with the current technology, and given that they did all that work just to store 256 bits of information tells me that it's not likely to continue.  This is ultimately just a research paper that shows if you really want to be covert in sending information like the key to decrypt information being sent via courier...but at that stage it only realistically has military applications...as there are methods of doing so that pretty much protect you from all but nation state attacks.

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

It's unlikely to progress into anything practical.  All of these types of innovations require expensive equipment and likely human intervention at some steps to get them working.

 

It effectively has to compete with the current technology, and given that they did all that work just to store 256 bits of information tells me that it's not likely to continue.  This is ultimately just a research paper that shows if you really want to be covert in sending information like the key to decrypt information being sent via courier...but at that stage it only realistically has military applications...as there are methods of doing so that pretty much protect you from all but nation state attacks.

So no women smuggling s data over borders giving new meaning to g cup?…. I did say disturbing.

[CTR640]

5 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

So no women smuggling s data over borders giving new meaning to g cup?…. I did say disturbing.

So instead of women smuggling over 10K USD, they can now smuggle over 10K in cryptos! The bigger the cups, the more they can carry so in future ETH and also ETH 2.0

So yes, even more disturbing

[Bombastinator]

39 minutes ago, CTR640 said:

So instead of women smuggling over 10K USD, they can now smuggle over 10K in cryptos! The bigger the cups, the more they can carry so in future ETH and also ETH 2.0

So yes, even more disturbing

True.  You win.