[Cryptography] What is a secure conversation? (Was: online forums...)

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 2:25 PM, John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:

> >> The U.S. Government's first priority should be to do this at our
> nuclear weapons labs, before our bomb design codes (in Fortran, no doubt)
> wind up on BitTorrent.
> >
> > The nuclear codes leaked long ago. I know the navy one from the 60s
>
> You are talking about two different things.
>
> The "bomb design codes" are software programs built to simulate
> nuclear reactions in particular physical constructions.  These have
> the original Manhattan Project calculations (done on punched cards,
> with tabulators, as described in Feynmann's autobiography) as remote
> ancestors.
>
> The "nuclear codes" ("launch codes") are a short sequence that arms the
> missiles before sending them into the sky.  The "key" of a security
> system that keeps particular bombs from exploding.
>
> Both of them need a lot of other infrastructure to be useful to an
> adversary.  Launch codes from the '60s are probably declassified now
> anyway.  Nuclear simulation software in FORTRAN from the '60s would
> still be useful in designing nuclear bombs.  (Actually building them,
> getting them to targets, and detonating them would be big challenges.)
>

Look up GEANT.

The necessary tools have been open source since before the term was coined.





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Website: http://hallambaker.com/
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