Secure exchange of information by synchronization of neural networks

¹ Department of Physics, Bar Ilan University - 52900 Ramat Gan, Israel
² Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Würzburg Am Hubland, D-97074 Würzburg, Germany

Received: 27 July 2001
Accepted: 16 October 2001

Abstract

A connection between the theory of neural networks and cryptography is presented. A new phenomenon, namely synchronization of neural networks is leading to a new method of exchange of secret messages. Numerical simulations show that two artificial networks being trained by Hebbian learning rule on their mutual outputs develop an antiparallel state of their synaptic weights. The synchronized weights are used to construct an ephemeral key exchange protocol for a secure transmission of secret data. It is shown that an opponent who knows the protocol and all details of any transmission of the data has no chance to decrypt the secret message, since tracking the weights is a hard problem compared to synchronization. The complexity of the generation of the secure channel is linear with the size of the network.