:-) --- begin forwarded text To: Vin McLellan <vin@shore.net> cc: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>, dcsb@ai.mit.edu Subject: Re: Could E.M. Cordian be Matt Blaze in Disguise? (Nah!) Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 05:33:22 -0500 From: Matt Blaze <mab@research.att.com> That you for CCing the enclosed message. I must admit that I'm rather puzzled by it. This is the first I've head of an "E.M Cordian," or for that matter "M.F. Tones" or "Mr. Rogue." I am quite sure, however, that I am none of these people. I have also never seen, or claimed to have seen, any description of the RSA algorithm, other than the the recently declassified public key historical material from GCHQ, that predates R, S and A's original paper on the subject. I don't subscribe to the cypherpunks mailing list (or, for that matter, DCSB), and I've only just now scanned over the web page mentioned in your message, so I'm unclear as to what might be going on. Perhaps someone is confused about the $7.00 "better DES challenge" that I offered last year (which was solved this year by the EFF DES brute force hardware). 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. Feel free to forward this as you see fit. Thanks -Matt Blaze

Out on the Cypherpunks List, "Anonymous" claimed to reveal the real identity of E.M. Cordian, the organizer of the DES Analytical Crack. See: http://www.cyberspace.org/~enoch/crakfaq.html

...

Shouldn't we be using "Mr. Cordian's" real name? Matt Blaze (mab@research.att.com), also occasionally known as "M.F. Tones", and even less often as "Mr. Rouge" (There should be an accent mark there actually).

In response, Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com> declared:

...

Just to clear the air a smidge.

If Matt Blaze says he's looking for an algebraic inverse to DES, I tend to believe him...

Jeeze, Rob! This is your attempt to help "clear the air?"

I do not for a moment believe that Eric Michael Cordian <emc@wire.insync.net> is a pseudonym for Matt Blaze <mab@research.att.com>!

You should maybe query Matt directly <mab@research.att.com> before you endorse E.M. Cordian as Matt Blaze in drag. You could confuse a whole lot of people who trust your insider knowledge of these steamy Net Affairs.

To anyone familiar with Blaze's essays, speeches, & on-line posts, a scan of Mr. Codrian's FAQ and published comments should make it apparent that this suggestion is unlikely, if not perposterous.

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;-)

There was no such book. Cordian's statement is just not true. The real Matt Blaze -- the guy who wrote the pithy Afterward to Schneier's Applied Cryptography,II -- would know that this is not true.

(Actually, I'd bet that even Robert Hettinga knows that this is untrue.)

Mind you, if the real Matt Blaze announced that he was seeking $500 from twenty people to fund a private research project which he felt had a meaningful chance of casting DES as a NP-hard combinatorial problem and attacking it with an appropriate combinatorial algorithm, I'd send a check off tomorrow.

The real Matt Blaze would not have 15 donors -- as Mr. Cordian reports -- but be stimied on how to get five more.

I wish Mr. Cordian well in his algebraic attack on DES -- but, unfortunately, he is not the real Matt Blaze. Not even a near-clone.

We could do with a few more professionals with Blaze's talent, energy, and integrity in general circulation.

Suerte,

_Vin

----- "Cryptography is like literacy in the Dark Ages. Infinitely potent, for good and ill... yet basically an intellectual construct, an idea, which by its nature will resist efforts to restrict it to bureaucrats and others who deem only themselves worthy of such Privilege." _ A Thinking Man's Creed for Crypto _vbm.

* Vin McLellan + The Privacy Guild + <vin@shore.net> * 53 Nichols St., Chelsea, MA 02150 USA <617> 884-5548

--- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'