[Cryptography] Regarding LUCIFER

Richard Outerbridge outer at interlog.com
Sun Mar 8 23:52:17 EDT 2015


Recently I sent a Letter to the Editor of CRYPTOLOGIA.

Here is my letter, followed by his response.

===== My Letter

Dear Craig Bauer,

LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF CRYPTOLOGIA

Dear Editor,

In regards to LUCIFER.

In 1984 Dr. Arthur Sorkin published in CRYPTOLOGIA [1][2] the first
available description of IBM's LUCIFER algorithm, widely considered
to be the direct historical precedent of the Data Encryption Standard.

For whatever reason, in those times things were perhaps felt to be
self evident.  In any event, Dr.Sorkin did not publish any test vectors
or triples of key, plain & ciphertext with which to verify anyone's
(let alone his own) implementation of the FORTRAN program that you
published for him at that time.  Early days indeed!

Below please find what I believe to be representative sets of triples
for Dr.Sorkin’s FORTRAN implementation of LUCIFER, as published by
CRYPTOLOGIA in 1984, based upon my own contemporaneous C language
versions of Dr.Sorkin's FORTRAN programs.


Key:    01 23 45 67 89 ab cd ef fe dc ba 98 76 54 32 10
Input:  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Cipher: a2 01 fc 18 d6 2c 85 ef 59 65 a5 82 95 bb f6 09

Key:    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Input:  01 23 45 67 89 ab cd ef fe dc ba 98 76 54 32 10
Cipher: 9d 14 fe 43 77 aa 87 dd 07 cc 8a 14 52 2c 21 ed

Key:    01 23 45 67 89 ab cd ef fe dc ba 98 76 54 32 10
Input:  ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
Cipher: 97 f1 c1 04 b0 f1 20 d1 94 c0 70 24 f1 48 15 ed

Key:    ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff
Input:  01 23 45 67 89 ab cd ef fe dc ba 98 76 54 32 10
Cipher: d4 42 a3 4d d7 0e 2b 41 56 eb 0f 2a 8a de d1 a7

Key:    01 23 45 67 89 ab cd ef fe dc ba 98 76 54 32 10
Input:  01 23 45 67 89 ab cd ef fe dc ba 98 76 54 32 10
Cipher: cf 46 62 2f a9 85 46 bb 9a 5b c0 02 39 eb 0c 92

Key:    fe dc ba 98 76 54 32 10 01 23 45 67 89 ab cd ef
Input:  01 23 45 67 89 ab cd ef fe dc ba 98 76 54 32 10
Cipher: 7f af 65 bf c5 45 8f d2 dc 9c c2 26 60 12 ef 44


How do I know they are right?  I don't.  Absent any readily
available published triple, what I did was to ensure that the
FORTRAN published in CRYPTOLOGIA could in fact be compiled;
then execute it to obtain results; and then check those results
against those of the C programs I wrote to validate Dr.Sorkin's
work, as published in CRYPTOLOGIA in 1984, 30 years ago.  That
used to be the way one went about such things.

If you think your readership might also be interested in some
of my hideously 30 year old C programs (albeit a bit freshened
up for modern compilers), please let me know.

It would not be the first time that source code for LUCIFER
has appeared in CRYPTOLOGIA.

Yours faithfully,

Richard Outerbridge

[1] CRYPTOLOGIA, VOLUME 8, NUMBER 1, JANUARY 1984: 22-42.
[2] CRYPTOLOGIA, VOLUME 8, NUMBER 3, JULY 1984: 260-261.

===== His Response

08-Mar-2015

Dear Mr Outerbridge:

I regret to inform you that our reviewers have now considered your
paper but unfortunately feel it unsuitable for publication in
Cryptologia. For your information I attach the reviewer comments at
the bottom of this email.  I hope you will find them to be
constructive and helpful. You are of course now free to submit the
paper elsewhere should you choose to do so.

Thank you for considering Cryptologia. I hope the outcome of this
specific submission will not discourage you from the submission of
future manuscripts.

Sincerely, Craig Bauer Editor in Chief, Cryptologia [email]

Reviewer(s)' Comments to Author:

Reviewer: 1

Comments to the Author
While historical cryptographic protocols are of interest and LUCIFER
is therefore a suitable topic, this note is of little minimal
interest.

Editor's comment - I'm very interested in pre-Lucifer digital
systems, if you have anything not already in the literature to
offer! The transitional era between machine ciphers and digital
ciphers has been barely explored!

=====

__outer




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