Here are the biggest breakthroughs in cryptography during the period when the NSA has been the purported leader in the field, and has enjoyed by far the largest budget: public key: Diffie, Hellman, Merkle, R.,S., A., etc. key escrow: Micali (and the current NSA/NIST scheme has all the earmarks of being thrown on top of Skipjack at the last moment, after Micali had published, and perhaps even after Denning had discussed it). DES: IBM Skipjack: probably just a modified DES IDEA: Swiss Also zero-knowledge proofs, blind signatures, oblivious transfer, BBS, and other recent advances were all discovered outside the NSA. For all their vaunted competence, for all the mathematicians they have been alleged to employ, despite having a cryptography budget orders of magnitude larger than any other Western crypto group, it looks like the NSA contribued to _none_ of the major advances in cryptography that occured during its zenith.