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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday July 04 2015, @08:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the kids-are-smarter-these-days dept.

Encrypting emails can be tedious, difficult and very confusing. And even for those who have mastered the process, it's useless unless the intended recipient has the correct software to decode the message. A Georgia Institute of Technology researcher has created an easier method – one that sounds familiar to parents who try to outsmart their 8-year-old child. The new technique gets rid of the complicated, mathematically generated messages that are typical of encryption software. Instead, the method transforms specific emails into ones that are vague by leaving out key words.

"It's kind of like when mom and dad are talking about potential vacation spots while the kids are nearby," said Eric Gilbert, the Georgia Tech assistant professor who developed the software. "They can't say or spell 'Disney,' or the children will get too excited. So they use other words and the meaning is implied. Instead of 'Disney,' they could say 'have you bought tickets to the place yet.'"

Gilbert's Open Book system, a prototype that uses a Google Mail plug-in called Read Me, works the same way by substituting specific words with ambiguous ones. If the above example was an email conversation, the sender would write, "Have you bought tickets to Disney yet?" Open Book would change the message when it was sent. The other person would see, "Have you bought tickets to (place) yet?"

The process reduces the information disclosed to eavesdroppers or computer systems that monitor online communications, while taking advantage of common ground between the participants.

The system was presented at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2015) in Seoul, South Korea, April 18-23 (Open Book: A Socially Inspired Cloaking Technique that Uses Lexical Abstraction to Transform Messages) [PDF].


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday July 04 2015, @09:30PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday July 04 2015, @09:30PM (#205118) Homepage

    Credit where credit's due -- the code talkers were bilingual Native Americans [wikipedia.org] and their exploits were security through obscurity.

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  • (Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday July 05 2015, @02:44PM

    by Francis (5544) on Sunday July 05 2015, @02:44PM (#205290)

    Which is fine if you just need to make sure the materials aren't used within a tight time-frame. Most of the things they were conveying were really only sensitve for a few hours or days. And unless the war had dragged on for decades, it's rather unlikely that the Germans could have encountered the language enough to learn to understand it.