Vin McLellan, apparently not satisfied with only one flame, makes this response to a very conveniently appearing anonymous remailer troll saying something silly about Matt Blaze:
The real Matt Blaze would also not be making these absurd and false claims that some mysterious "book" describing a cryptosystem identical or equivalent to the RSA public key cryptosystem was published "years" before Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adelman first published their RSA PKC algorithm in April, 1977. (It's well documented in the Cypherpunk archives, Codrian assures us;-)
Here the disingenuous Vin gives his own description of my prior post, which he then proceeds to loudly refute, and I certainly didn't use the word "identical" or the word "equivalent." I stated that descriptions of "that which is now known as RSA" have appeared in print, and that the one-way characteristics of the RSA trap-door function were also previously known. The arguments for invalidation of the RSA patent were based on two central claims. First, that work which contained similar material was distributed by preprint and presented at conferences more than one year before the RSA patent was applied for. This would include the Diffie-Hellman paper on "Multiuser Cryptographic Techniques", the early Merkle-Hellman work, and the Pohlig-Hellman work. The second claim that may be made against RSA is that the system is "obvious." Support for this claim may be found in books dating all the way back to the 19th century which discuss both the cryptographic usefulness of one-way functions, and the factorization of the product of two primes as one example of such a function. Quoting "Cyberlaw": "There are a number of references in the prior art, moreover, to using the problem of factoring composite numbers in cryptography, dating back to the 19th century. "In 1870, a book by William S. Jevons described the relationship of one-way functions to cryptography and went on to discuss specifically the factorization problem used to create the "trap-door" in the RSA system."
There was no such book. Cordian's statement is just not true.
Only a complete moron would place himself in the position of trying to prove such an all-encompassing negative.
(Actually, I'd bet that even Robert Hettinga knows that this is untrue.)
People_insulted_by_Vin_in_this_thread++;
The real Matt Blaze would not have 15 donors -- as Mr. Cordian reports -- but be stimied on how to get five more.
If you had correctly read the FAQ, you would see that we have 5 sponsors, and 15 open sponsorships. We are not stimied, we are writing and debugging many thousands of lines of extremely complex code, and do not wish to be distracted by further marketing activities at this time.
I wish Mr. Cordian well in his algebraic attack on DES
All together now. "Bwahahahahahahhahaahah!" This concludes my response to Vin, who may now return to his regularly scheduled trolling lessons. Now, if this weren't all hilarious enough, Matt Blaze, who is usually smarter than this, feels an urgent need to leap in with...
Whatever this is about, however, I assure you that any use of my name in connection with a solicitation for funds for some sort of "analytical DES cracking" effort, or any suggestion that I'm involved in such a project, is absolutely false and perhaps fraudulent.
Let me state for the record that the DES Analytic Crack Project has made no claims about any of the prople working on it, other than that they are competent implementors of complex algorithms. Matt Blaze is not associated with the project, and if any other crypto notables wish a similar public statement made about them, they have only to email and request it. Sponsorships for the project are being solicited on the basis of the statement of work in the FAQ, and work product to date. They are not being solicited based on any representation that various individuals with recognizable names are associated with the project. Anonymous trolls making such allegations, followed by irate rebuttals by shills, and scientists who should know better, are clearly an attempt at disruption. Continued such antics will be met with an appropriate legal response. -- Sponsor the DES Analytic Crack Project http://www.cyberspace.org/~enoch/crakfaq.html