Schneier on Security

Bruce,

"It's hard to imagine non-NSA cryptography from the 1960s"

Naughty naughty what where the UK's GCHQ and other countries crypto organistions doing making ham sandwiches ?

@Clive, no they were still trying to decide between cyanide or silk...

Having had a quick look through the paper I think the refrence to cryptography is a bit thin at best.

Basically they have analysed the batteries for Two-Fault and Three-Fault corelations. In effect they have shown that faults are related to each other in the various manufacturing processes. That is a particular manufacture has defect charecteristics peculier to their manufacturing proces (a not unexpected outcome).

Basically quite simple statistical analysis of a moderatly complex data set. The reference to cryptography is a bit of wishfull thinking at best, possibly to "sex-up" an otherwise dull paper.

It sounds more like Abraham Sinkov's _Elementary Cryptanalysis: A Mathematical Approach_.

I agree with Clive Robinson, it's simple statistical analysis.

"It's hard to imagine non-NSA cryptography from the 1960s...."

There was plenty of commercial and other non-NSA cryptography -- computer-based and otherwise -- from the 1960s. The NSA did make sure it could break any widely published methods. (Some claim that is still the case, despite recent "open" reviews of cryptographic algorithms.)

Non-NSA cryptanalysis from the 1960s was lagging however.

Actually, this is a rather cute idea.

On one hand, it is just a statistical analysis. Breaking most trivial coding reverts to analysis. Instead of starting from scratch and working through each possible source for underlying data, the researchers just pointed this large cannon of cryptography tools at the problem and pulled the trigger.

Given Google's purely statistical translation work, I wonder what problems could be solved by just assuming that language translation is just an encyption operation.

I recall Gordon Welchman's The Hut Six story. Aside from the descriptions and diagrams of the enigma and bombes, he had some interesting opinions on modern ciphers and the future of cryptography.

I recall that he really didn't like digital ciphers like DES; although, AFAIK he wasn't explicit as to why. Does anyone know?

@Clive Robinson

"Naughty naughty what where the UK's GCHQ and other countries crypto organistions doing making ham sandwiches ?"

I am sure they were doing many things. However, sharing their cryptanalysis techniques with NASA was probably not one of those things.

@ndg

"However, sharing their cryptanalysis techniques with NASA was probably not one of those things. "

Ah have a look at the work of "Clifford Cocks" and "non secret encryption" that predated RSA by some time. It is the most public asspect of the UK USA (BRUSA) sharing agreements. Further info from,

http://cryptome.org/nsa-nse/nsa-nse-01.htm

GCHQ (as was) actually passed it over to the NSA who apparently poo pooed it as to complex to be practical...