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

[Matt Blaze]

On May 8, 2008, at 19:08, Leichter, Jerry wrote:
> 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.


I've heard similar recollections of mathematicians from improbably
abstract specialties being eagerly taken in by NSA, throughout the
cold war.   I've also heard it said that at one time NSA was the
US's single largest employer of math PhDs.  I don't know if that
was actually true, but it certainly seems plausible.

But it's also important to remember that crypto isn't the only
area of the NSA mission that benefits from mathematical expertise.
I suspect that while many of these NSA math PhDs were indeed doing
cryptomathematics, a large fraction were (and are) working on
other SIGINT problems such as signal processing, databases and
searching, coding theory, machine learning, and so.  Some of the
(non-crypto) problems here seem rather specific to the NSA's domain,
and so don't likely have an advanced civilian research community
competing with them they way academic crypto does today.

A couple of the papers from the 1970's hint (in redacted form,
frustratingly)  that the NSA then had large scale automatic systems
for intercepting and processing morse code signals from large
blocks of radio spectrum, which implies some pretty advanced
(for that era) signal processing and computing, crypto aside.

-matt

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