Kerry L. Bonin writes:
Most people who have worked with military crypto systems do, off the record. The difference between what is public and what has been developed with decades of unlimited resources is staggering. How many cryptographers or discrete math experts work in the public domain? Now how many work for the NSA? That's how many orders of magnitude? And how many orders of magnitude difference in budgets, ect., even with bureaucratic and civil service overhead.
IMHO you haven't done much budgeting or defense work. I worked on a project secret enough that I still can't mention the name of the project (although the name itself is unclassified -- my association with the project was classified, however). Budgeting is still a factor in defense work. Your messages start to sound like the crypto that Tom Clancy uses in his novels, crypto that always annoys me because it is so fake. I agree that the NSA may have a few tricks up its sleeve on top of some pretty powerful specialized cracking hardware, but we are talking about needing heavy wizardry to do real-time cipher cracking, not just some parlor tricks that drop the work factor by 1000 or so. For the NSA to generally do what you propose, they would need some exponential-time methods, methods that would drop the work factor by 10^78 (or something like that). It is just a whole lot easier to do a black-bag job on a North Korean embassy (for example) than to directly attack their crypto. That is why defense companies do background checks, that is why some areas of military facilities are guarded by soldiers with guns, and that is why the NSA tried to conceal all evidence of their existence for a while. Crypto is just one part of a unified security policy -- sometimes not a very important part at that. ==================================================== Mark Leighton Fisher Thomson Consumer Electronics fisherm@tce.com Indianapolis, IN, USA "Display some adaptability." -- Doug Shaftoe, _Cryptonomicon_