[2012] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: secret history of the development of PK crypto
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Allen Simpson)
Mon Dec 29 09:37:04 1997
Date: Mon, 29 Dec 97 00:57:33 GMT
From: "William Allen Simpson" <wsimpson@greendragon.com>
To: cryptography@c2.net
Catching up on holiday traffic, I found this as fascinating as the rest
of you. Added to my amazement on the breadth of Bellovin, Karn, et alia,
having reasoned in parallel with each other and NSA how to use this
for nuclear weapons activation (an area I confess I have never explored,
being an old "freeze" activist -- no new ones, until we use the ones we
already have :-).
What struck me most was the dates. Sure, they are before D-H, and maybe
we should give them some credit. But, however strong the motivation for
finding a "non-secret" method for weapons control, it does not appear
that they published even internal reports on PKC until 1970, and
practical methods in 1973, 1974 and 1976.
Consider that internal reports usually get publishing dates a lot sooner
than academic conference proceedings, what with the paper submission and
review lag. I seem to remember from the patent date discussion that D-H
certainly took more than 6 months to publish and more than a year to
patent application. The corresponding publication dates are 1976, 1977
and 1978.
For a long time, folks (including myself) have worried that we were a
long way behind the "spooks" on developing the field. The fact that DES
was designed to resist differential some 17 years before the academics
was particularly troublesome.
It seems to me that these dates show 2 things. Academia only started
4-6 years behind on PKC. And while it took another 3-6 years for the
"closed community" to develop the practical methods, it took the open
community only 1-2 years, and has been accelerating ever since.
Thus, we may not be as behind as previously thought. We may not be
behind at all.
And, as a parting thought, this might explain the "hole in the lab wall"
story that Schiller likes to tell from time to time. It makes a lot
more sense to suppress a paper that is only a few years behind than one
that is over a decade behind....
WSimpson@UMich.edu
Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32
