[Cryptography] nuclear arming codes

[Bart Preneel]

On Fri, 3 Jan 2014, Jerry Leichter wrote:

> On Jan 3, 2014, at 1:01 AM, John Gilmore wrote:
>> PS: Gus Simmons was also key to making the test-ban treaties work, by
>> providing cryptographic protocols that allowed sensors to be placed in
>> each others' countries, that would report back only what the treaty
>> allowed them to report, with no covert channels for additional
>> information, and verification that the sensor packages had not been
>> tampered with.
> Use of public key cryptography for this kind of thing was in common public discussion when RSA first gained broad use.  Was it just an obvious application, given the confluence of the invention of public key and the wide discussions surrounding the negotiations on test bans at the time, or did something of the secret work actually slip out?  A topic for some future historian's dissertation, perhaps.
>
> Meanwhile, a forward-looking question:  Given what we know today - about cryptography in general, and NSA's infiltration of pretty much anything having to *do* with cryptographic implementations in particular - would it be possible to have an agreement such as the old test-ban treaty whose verification relies on cryptography?  The 1980's ideas about public key looked naive even prior to Snodownia, but at least one could argue that it was *possible* to get the required level of assurance for both parties.  Is that even conceivable today?
>                                                        -- Jerry
>

I remember a talk y Gus Simmons in which he described that, when he read
the new directions paper by Diffie and Hellman (introducing public key), 
it immediately struck him that this would be a perfect solution 
for user authentication for nuclear applications.  In any case he did 
not hint at knowing about public key cryptology before.

On the other hand, when he invented MAC algorithms (probably for the same purpose),
his patent application was hit with a secrecy order. Moreover NSA refused 
to give him any MAC or encryption algorithms to deploy on Sovjet territory - 
that's how he came up in the mid 1980s with information theoretically secure 
authentication.

Conclusion: it may well be that NSA had invented public key cryptology earlier, 
but they would not tell the Department of Energy about it.

G.J. Simmons, A survey of information authentication,
in Contemporary Cryptology: The Science of Information Integrity, 
G.J. Simmons, Ed., IEEE Press, 1991, pages 381-419

G.J. Simmons, How to insure that data acquired to verify treat compliance
are trustworthy," in Contemporary Cryptology: The Science of Information 
Integrity, G.J. Simmons, Ed., IEEE Press, 1991, pages 615-630

-Bart