Could E.M. Cordian be Matt Blaze in Disguise? (Nah!)

[Robert Hettinga]

:-)

Bwahahaha!

Isn't this fun???

Cheers,
Bob Hettinga

--- begin forwarded text


X-Sender: vin at shell1.shore.net
Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1998 00:31:21 -0500
To: Robert Hettinga <rah at shipwright.com>, dcsb at ai.mit.edu
From: Vin McLellan <vin at shore.net>
Subject: Could E.M. Cordian be Matt Blaze in Disguise?  (Nah!)
Cc: Matt Blaze <mab at research.att.com>
Status: U

	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 at 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 at 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 at wire.insync.net> is a pseudonym for Matt Blaze <mab at research.att.com>!

	You should maybe query Matt directly <mab at 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 at shore.net>    *
      53 Nichols St., Chelsea, MA 02150 USA <617> 884-5548

--- end forwarded text


-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'