How far is the NSA ahead of the public crypto community?

[Leichter, Jerry]

An interesting datapoint I've always had on this question:  Back in 1975
or so, a mathematician I knew (actually, he was a friend's PhD advisor)
left academia to go work for the NSA.  Obviously, he couldn't say
anything at all about what he would be doing.

The guy's specialty was algebraic geometry - a hot field at the time.
This is the area of mathematics that studied eliptic curves many years
before anyone realized they had any application to cryptography.  In
fact, it would be years before anyone on the outside could make any
kind of guess about what in the world the NSA would want a specialist
in algebraic geometry to do.  At the time, it was one of the purest
of the pure fields.

The friend he used to advise bumped into this guy a few years later
at a math conference.  He asked him how it felt not to be able to
publish openly.  The response:  When I was working at the university,
there were maybe 30 specialists in the world who read and understood
my papers.  There aren't quite as many now, but they really appreciate
what I do.
							-- Jerry


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