Using a reservoir computer to learn chaotic attractors, with applications to chaos synchronisation and cryptography
This work addresses chaos synchronization and cryptography for researchers in dynamical systems and security, but it is incremental as it applies an existing method to new tasks.
The paper tackled the problem of emulating chaotic systems using reservoir computing, demonstrating that trained reservoir computers can achieve chaos synchronization with systems like Mackey-Glass and Lorenz, and applied this to crack chaos-based cryptography.
Using the machine learning approach known as reservoir computing, it is possible to train one dynamical system to emulate another. We show that such trained reservoir computers reproduce the properties of the attractor of the chaotic system sufficiently well to exhibit chaos synchronisation. That is, the trained reservoir computer, weakly driven by the chaotic system, will synchronise with the chaotic system. Conversely, the chaotic system, weakly driven by a trained reservoir computer, will synchronise with the reservoir computer. We illustrate this behaviour on the Mackey-Glass and Lorenz systems. We then show that trained reservoir computers can be used to crack chaos based cryptography and illustrate this on a chaos cryptosystem based on the Mackey-Glass system. We conclude by discussing why reservoir computers are so good at emulating chaotic systems.