Early Battles

[Perry E. Metzger]

Norman Hardy says:
> I remember hearing an anecdote from a fairly private but
> unclassified source. According to this source NSA was incensed when
> IBM first developed Lucifer for banking applications, especially
> because they published details in a Scientific American article. NSA
> accused IBM of stealing secrets from NSA thru IBM employees having
> access to NSA technology as part of their jobs developing hardware
> and software for NSA. IBM was of course prepared for this
> eventuality. They quoted an early paper by Shannon suggesting that a
> mixture of transpositions and permutations would likely produce
> strong ciphers. This is, of course, the heart of both Lucifer and
> DES.
> NSA backed off.

This sounds like an urban legend -- NSA and IBM worked way too closely
on the development of DES for this to sound likely.

.pm