[Cryptography] NSA versus DES etc....

Richard Outerbridge outer at interlog.com
Thu Oct 2 15:25:18 EDT 2014


On 2014-10-02 (275), at 05:32:03, John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:

>> One point for:  Suite A and friends, which remains a heavily shared secret.
>> ...
>> I guess the various well-funded enemies have figured out each other's
>> secret algorithms by now, but out of politeness and common interest they
>> cartelise the secrets.
> 
> Let's go a bit deeper into this.  Politeness?  Common interest?  Really?
> 
> Suppose Nation X reveals big Nation U's sooper secret crypto
> algorithms.  Then Nation U is embarrassed -- and possibly has to go to
> great trouble and expense to update all their crypto algorithms.

Both the USA & USSR relied on keeping rotor wirings for the KL-7 and the
FIALKA secret, the USSR less so, since theirs never changed, and the USA
more so, since theirs did on a regular basis.

We know that the USSR regularly obtained at least some of the USA Naval
KL-7 wirings through the John Walker spy ring.  We don’t know what those
were.  To this day we have no public knowledge of any actual KL-7 wiring
subnet sets.

We have no evidence that the USA ever had similar cognizance of any USSR
subnet wirings at the time, though perhaps since we do know the wirings of
the fixed Hungarian, Czechoslovakian and Polish FIALKA suggests they did.
__outer



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