On Wednesday, October 11, Bo Elkjaer Wrote:
Yesterday oct. 10 NSA was granted another patent for a >cryptographic device invented by William Friedman. The >application for the >patent was filed oct. 23 1936 -- 64 years >ago.
On 11 Oct 2000, raze wrote:
My question is this; why would they patent something that is 64 year old technology? This is like the Enigma machine no?!
Um, actually, no. The attacks we know on Rotor machines assume that the rotors rotate at predictable, constant intervals. This was true of the Engigma, but not true of some later Rotor machines. The papertape variation of this system, with every cipher wheel rotating by some varying amount between each letter, won't fall to any rotor attacks we know of until the papertapes have repeated at least twice each. Even then, it takes some fancy mathematics to figure out *how* to apply the rotor cryptanalysis to the system. After reading this newer patent, I think it's actually *LESS* secure than the system it purports to replace. I could be wrong here -- I'd like to actually see the diagrams and drawings and my browser doesn't support 'em -- but it looks like the rotations are constant per keystroke with this system, which would make it fall to rotor cryptanalysis. The crucial question, the one I can't make out without looking at the diagrams, is whether the mapping of rotations to rotors is different each time. Here's what I bet: department of the army didn't like the paper tape idea -- too fragile, too vulnerable to wet, required delicate machinery to read that had to be maintained -- and they wanted something a lot more rugged. So he designed something that ditched the paper tape idea for them. It wasn't as secure, but it was still better than the Hebern-style machines that were likely under consideration as an alternative. Bear