[Cryptography] NSA versus DES etc....

Richard Outerbridge outer at interlog.com
Fri Oct 3 14:57:05 EDT 2014


On 2014-10-03 (276), at 02:17:14, Paul Reuvers <info at cryptomuseum.com> wrote:

> Hi Guys,
> 
> The fact that we have the wirings for the HU, CZ and PO version of Fialka, is due to the fact that we actually found these machines on the surplus market (well, CZ and PO that is), although at least one person was jailed for that. We did not get them from any US source. 

So the immediate lesson learned is that Kerckhoff’s principle is alive & well?

Relying on the secrecy of the method is a fatal mistake, one the NSA apparently
blithely committed from 1949 through the early 1980s with its KL-7 device.

The much more important lesson is that key management matters far more than
any crypto itself, at least for symmetric crypto.
__outer



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