[Cryptography] NIST Workshop on Elliptic Curve Cryptography Standards

[Ray Dillinger]

>>   My understanding is they changed it to protect against 
>>   differential cryptanalysis. At the time, differential 
>>   cryptanalysis was known by NSA, but not generally known in the 
>>   public crypto community. (The public crypto community was almost 
>>   non-existant at the time.)

According to the histories I've read, differential analysis
was known at IBM.  They called it the "Tickle attack" and
had not published a paper about it because the NSA was
working with them on DES and had asked them not to.

Also there was not much prestige in publishing crypto papers
at the time; as you note, the civilian crypto community was
almost nonexistent. As far as I know cryptography wasn't a
category in which papers were accepted by journals at that
time, although the fundamentals behind a particular new
crypto attack would sometimes get published in a math journal.

It certainly wasn't a category in which papers were sought
or awards were given, nor in which civilian conferences and
symposia were occurring.

			Bear

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