4 ms·
>> would it all be undetectable to us if it were encrypted? Encryption as far as i know does not deal with hiding information in background noise of communicat
by v-erne 4y ago
>> would it all be undetectable to us if it were encrypted?
Encryption as far as i know does not deal with hiding information in background noise of communication channel. So most types of encrypted communication still can be detected (but not understood).
You would need aliens that are actively hidding their communication inside of natural phenomena, which is a little bit of a stretch to me.
- WhitneyLand 4y agoNot sure what you mean by “hiding information”. Encrypted data should appear no different than random noise right? I’m not an expert on this stuff at all, but it seems also unlikely we could depend on it being concentrated within a single frequency band.
- v-erne 4y ago>> Encrypted data should appear no different than random noise right As far as I know its not true - usually there are statistical anomalies that gives away encrypted data. The other part is the the randomness of background noise of the universe. Can anybody give some input here ? I do not really know this but if I had to guess the universe does not generator true randomness but some signals that can be recognized as natural background signal?
- WhitneyLand 4y agoIt seems all encryption is not theoretically guaranteed to appear random, but practically speaking it’s nearly impossible to do. For example, there’s no known way to do this against AES, which is used prominently in HTTPS. I still feel like I must be missing something, because this fact would be obvious to SETI researchers… https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/1646/is-it-possible-to-distinguish-a-securely-encrypted-ciphertext-from-random-noise https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/1646/is-it-possib...
- WhitneyLand 4y agoI read this back and realized my wording wasn’t precise: All well encrypted data should appear as random noise practically speaking.