[1979] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: secret history of the development of PK crypto
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ted Morris)
Thu Dec 18 01:07:23 1997
In-Reply-To: <199712171913.OAA12218@postal.research.att.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 1997 18:16:03 -0500
To: Steven Bellovin <smb@research.att.com>
From: Ted Morris <morriswe@email.uc.edu>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net, coderpunks@toad.com
Steven Bellovin just wrote:
>There is, I think, a lot more that is to be learned about the development
>of public key crypto inside of assorted agencies. Diffie notes that in
>the 1986 Encyclopedia Britannica (I haven't checked later editions), the
>director of NSA claimed (without substantiation) that NSA had had public
>key crypto a decade earlier than Diffie and Hellman.
For the record, in the CD-ROM version of the 1997 Encyclopedia Britannica,
under "Cryptology: Cryptography: Two-key Cryptography," there is the
following:
>Whereas single-key cryptosystems have been in use for centuries, two-key
>cryptography is a recent >development. In 1976, Whitfield Diffie and
>Martin E. Hellman proposed a conceptual scheme for this kind of
>>cryptosystem, which they called a public-key cryptosystem, because users
>could avoid the key distribution >problem by simply publishing their
>encryption keys in a public directory. This was the first discussion of
>two-key >cryptography in the open literature. However, Adm. Bobby Inman,
>while director of the U.S. National Security >Agency, pointed out that
>two-key cryptography had been discovered at the agency a decade earlier.
Cheers,
Ted Morris.
