Pyrrhus Cracks RSA?
CAN THE GOVERNMENT BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB? by mercury@well.sf.ca.us <Michael E. Marotta> Long ago, Captain Kirk and his crew stumbled on a Nazi planet. A Federation dude found them earlier and decided to industrialize their society by the "most efficient" means possible. No one was surprised at this. In "Mirror, Mirror" Spock-2 predicts that the Evil Federation will collapse. This was also accepted without comment. Star Trek, perhaps more than any other mass media production, reflects the American psyche. Americans, of course, are humans. Human nature accepts dualities easily. On the one hand, people admire the conqueror. On the other, the historical evidence is never denied: empires always collapse. (Look at what remains: farming, writing, arithmetic, ships and chariots, clothing,... These are useful.) Not so long ago, Ayn Rand showed that evil only triumphs when good people work f+ it. When good people do nothing, evil fails. Cypherpunks know that centralized systems are inefficient, yet they fear the NSA. Cypherpunks know that government employees are slugabeds, yet they fear the NSA. Cypherpunks know that qinnovation and enterprise are the antithesis of socialism, yet they fear the NSA. They don't fear that the NSA will kick in their doors and shoot them in a cybernetic Kristallnacht or burn t(their homes the way the Romans and Mongols did to Carthage and Samarkand. (Waco comes to mind, here.) No, the Cypherpunk is afraid that the government has "powerful computers" capable of a "brute force attack" on their algorithms. It may be true. Having Archimedes in town only bought the Syracusans time, it didn't assure them victory. The US Govt drafted 90% of the physicists in the world, gave them virtually unlimited resources and in five years, it had atomic bombs. The American and Soviet governments proved that they could harness nineteenth century technology and shoot things into space. (According to Willey Ley what made their rockets possible was the pumps which came from fire trucks.) Ask "anyone" and they will tell you that World War Two brought us nuclear power, spaceships, radar, television, the transistor, the computer, canned food, and recycling. In fact, it brought none of these. They already existed. Absent the person with an idea, the Government would still be beating farmers with rods for not giving up their goats and grain. (The pharoah's toughs used sticks with sharp stones in them until bronze came along. Later, their bronze weapons were chopped up by people with iron. Why didn't the pharoah's priests discover bronze and iron?) Both William Friedman and the man he detested, Herbert O. Yardley, despaired in wartime for the lack of people with "cipher sense." An infinite number of clerks with typewriters could not break the simplest code. The government enlisted people who liked crossword puzzles, mathematicians, polyglots, anyone and everyone who played with symbols. It made no difference. There was no way to tell who had "cipher sense" and there was no way to TEACH it. Friedman was an obsessive-compulsive who worked himself into a neurotic frenzy, breaking the Purple Code. Turing delivered the "Bombe" that broke Enigma. You know the people who could break DES, RSA, PGP, etc. Shamir unpacked Diffie's knapsack. What is most probable, is that these ciphers will stand for some unforeseeable time until someone who may not be born yet comes along and breaks them all as an idle {exercise on her way to greatness in another field. But the NSA? No way, Jose. They might be nerds who hacked some code at 3 am. But you put them on a salary and benefits in a pyramid, then tell them not to talk about their work, and you thwart whatever creativity they had. The NSA can kill you. But t({they can never out-think you. qiM{iW{x
Michael Marotta writes an intruiging political essay, though I have some corrections/disagreements. I'll also talk about NSA employment of mathematicians, from the 1950s on, the founding and funding of Engineering Research Associates, Cray Research, the Institute for Defense Analysis, and the ultra-secretive Jasons Group.
CAN THE GOVERNMENT BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB? by mercury@well.sf.ca.us <Michael E. Marotta>
Cypherpunks know that centralized systems are inefficient, yet they fear the NSA. Cypherpunks know that government employees are slugabeds, yet they fear the NSA. Cypherpunks know that qinnovation and enterprise are the antithesis of socialism, yet they fear the NSA. They don't fear that the NSA will kick in their doors and shoot them in a cybernetic Kristallnacht or burn t(their homes the way the Romans and Mongols did to Carthage and Samarkand. (Waco comes to mind, here.) No, the Cypherpunk is afraid that the government has "powerful computers" capable of a "brute force attack" on their algorithms.
Some Cypherpunks (me, at least) are not afraid of the NSA's powerful computers. We understand that the mathematics of today's algorithms means the race is always won by the encryptor, not the cryptbreaker. If a dozen Crays at the Fort can--somehow--factor a 150-digit number, and thus break a 512-bit RSA key (more or less), then the encryptor can trivially move to a 1024-bit key....safe for many generations, even with 10,000 Crays munching away. Crypto is economics, as Eric Hughes likes to point out (but he's just one of my many tentacles, so I can freely quote him), and the public key math favors the encryptor over the would-be cypher breaker to an incredible extent, with the advantage growing ever-greater as key lengths increase. (Work out the math yourself...the advantage lies with the user of one-way functions...barring unforeseen breakthroughs in factoring, of which there is no evidence, or the reported proof that P = NP from Kryptogorodok, the secret city of Russian cryptographers in the Urals.) As Phil Karn and several others have noted, the weak link is physical security. Black bag jobs, viruses, etc. For example, my Macs have "keyboard capture" buffers, as Unix systems often do, that capture and stores _all_ keyboard entry in files, as an aid to recovering text entered. Great for writers, but a terrible security hole. (Watch out for this on Macs or Unix systems you may use!) These are the real weaknesses. Floppy disks laying around or "lost" that have one's secret key on them, combined with keyboard capture of the PGP passphrase. I expect at least some people have already had their PGP privacy turned into Pretty Crummy Privacy. And not by brute-force cracking. ...
pumps which came from fire trucks.) Ask "anyone" and they will tell you that World War Two brought us nuclear power, spaceships, radar, television, the transistor, the computer, canned food, and recycling. In fact, it brought none of these. They already
Well, some of these things existed in some form prior to WW II, but many key innovations reached fruition during the war: radar, rocketry, gyroscopes, etc. Some things were clearly invented _during_ the war: nuclear reactors, nuclear bombs, computers, etc. And the transistor, by the way, came after the war (the ordinary Shockley et. al. transistor at Bell Labs....the 1930s German work on metal-insulator-semiconductor devices, by Lillienfeld (as I dimly recall), was not really a precursor--the significance was not appreciated until decades later).
unpacked Diffie's knapsack. What is most probable, is that these ciphers will stand for some unforeseeable time until someone who may not be born yet comes along and breaks them all as an idle {exercise on her way to greatness in another field.
Maybe. But if factoring is shown to be NP-complete (it hasn't been so far, though most suspect it), then this future Gauss will truly be a giant.
But the NSA? No way, Jose. They might be nerds who hacked some code at 3 am. But you put them on a salary and benefits in a pyramid, then tell them not to talk about their work, and you thwart whatever creativity they had. The NSA can kill you. But t({they can never out-think you.
For many years the NSA hired as consultants some of the brightest mathemeticians in the world, including Claude Shannon (information theory), Andrew Gleason (math), E. Berlenkamp (algebraic coding theory), David Huffman (Huffman codes), Richard Garwin (physics), Luis Alvarez (physics, later known for the dinosaur extinction work--the idea that a giant meteor hit the NSA and killed it...just kidding), John R. Pierce (communications), Hendrik Bode (Bode plots), and so on.The NSA also funded Seymour Cray at Engineering Research Associates in the 1950s and even--many people claim--funded Cray Research in the early 1970s. NSA also was centrally involved in formation of Mitre Corp., The Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), and it built and paid for the "Communications Research Division" building at Princeton University...linked to what is now the John von Neumann Supercomputer Center (I may have the exact title wrong). (Source: Bamford's "The Puzzle Palace," 1982, and discussions with Brian Snow of the NSA at the 1988 Crypto Conference.) Yes, the NSA has long had many "tentacles" into academia. What was probably so shocking to them about the mid-70s breakthroughs in public key, by Diffie, Hellman, and Merkle, was that (presumably) this was work done outside their usual network of contract mathematicians. (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.) Mathematicians have to seek funding from somewhere. For many years, NSA was a prime source--and may still be. The "SCAMP" program ("Summer Campus, Advanced Mathematics Program") meets in a special building on the UCLA campus to discuss items of interest to the Agency, and to fund mathematicians who attend. Much like the ultra-secret "Jasons" and their summer work on La Jolla, California. A fascinating topic. I sure do wish someone would write another book on the Agency. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Note: I put time and money into writing this posting. I hope you enjoy it.
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