Re: Comments on NSA (was: "Pyrrhus Cracks RSA?")

[smb@research.att.com]

	 (NSA
	 has been making noises about how they'd already discovered public key
	 crypto years before Diffie and Hellman did. This could be face-saving
	 bragadoccio. Time will tell. Any NSA readers out there are free to
	 post anonymously to this group or to alt.whistleblowers, or to "sell"
	 your memoirs on BlackNet.)

There was an interesting discussion on this point at the ACM Conference
on Computer and Communications Security a few weeks ago.  At the
``Festcolloquium'' in honor of Gus Simmons, someone who used to work for
NSA (his name escapes me, but I have it at home) stated that in 1963,
President Kennedy signed a memorandum calling for -- in today's
language -- the use of digital signatures for nuclear weapons command
and control.

The memo -- National Action Security Memorandum (NASM) 160 -- is
still classified.  Someone else on this list (I'll let him speak for
himself) has contacted the JFK library about it.  It may already be
going through clearance release; if not, forms have been submitted
to initiate the release process.  And there's always FOIA if that
fails.

It will be very interesting to see the memorandum when it comes out.
(Btw, it was written by Jerome Weisner, Kennedy's science advisor.)
A lot of wisdom consists of asking the right questions; if the phrasing
was right, I would tend to believe that NSA did indeed have public
key technology in the mid-60's, once they were asked to create something
with those properties.  But if that was true, why didn't Simmons himself
know of it?  He said that he learned of public key from the Martin
Gardener column in Scientific American, as I recall.  Simmons was
familiar with NASM-160, though; in fact, he was the one who supplied
the number.


		--Steve Bellovin