[4495] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: The name of "RSA"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven M. Bellovin)
Fri Apr 9 15:19:04 1999
To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Cc: cryptography@c2.net
Date: Fri, 09 Apr 1999 12:34:50 -0400
From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@research.att.com>
In message <v04020a1bb333d51f7607@[139.167.130.249]>, Robert Hettinga writes:
> At 11:12 AM -0400 on 4/9/99, John David Galt wrote:
>
>
> > Can anyone tell us the names of the original British inventors of public ke
> y?
> > Granted that R, S, & A didn't plagiarize, but if they no longer want their
> > names used this way, perhaps their predecessors should get the honor instea
> d!
>
> Wasn't there also public key talked about in a memorandum to Kennedy about
> nuclear missle control?
Yes and no. The claim has been made, by reputable people, that
NSAM-160 laid the groundwork for NSA's invention of public key crypto.
But there's nothing in the declassified portion of the memo that supports
the claim. See http://www.research.att.com/~smb/nsam-160/ for more
details, including copies of NSAM-160. (And for those who are interested
in my page on Permissive Action Links and their relationship to cryptography
(http://www.research.att.com/~smb/nsam-160/pal.html), I have received one
of the papers I FOIAed; I hope to update the page in the near future.)
Btw -- contrary to my previous note, CESG seems to have the papers on
"non-secret encryption" available. See http://www.cesg.gov.uk/about/nsecret.htm
