Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • May 6, 2021 10:56 AM

@ ALL,

It is interesting especially when he talks about the breaking of Tunny and the mistake the designer at Siemens made in the keystream generation.

These days we normally get told about “key reuse” but we tend not to think about it in terms of “pairs” of key stream or plaintext characters.

Something all budding crypto designers should get in their heads.

Clive Robinson • May 7, 2021 3:57 AM

@ Jonathan Wilson,

Its a pitty the British government were too near sighted (and too scared of the world finding out that the UK had been reading everyone’s secrets)

It’s,a bit more complex than that, as modern day historians are finding out as Government papers locked up in the National Archives at Kew SW London are starting to find out.

Britain stood alone against Germany, and although it had an Empire it was at the point where the Empire was costing as much as it was giving. Most British assets of any worth were in the US.

Whilst Britain stood alone US Politicians assumed incorrectly that Britain had the,wealth of about one third of the world at it’s disposal, thus decided to put the screws on. Thus Britain not only got asset striped it realised it could not go on fighting without going bankrupt.

Lord Beaverbrook pointed out that if Britain was going to go bankrupt they might as well go “all out bankrupt” or go with a lions roar not a mouses squeak. Thus Britain placed order after order that it could not possibly pay for. Thus when the US politicians finally realised what was happening “they were in too deep” and could not get out very easily.

Thus “Leand Lease” amongst other things came about. What changed things was Japan attacking the US. So wilst the war was in progress the US Politicians were content to let Britain have more and more credit, as debt confers power to the creditor.

However when the war ended the credit was over, the cupboards were bare all assets sold, or indebted beyond any worth, in a world where the economy was compleatly depressed and trade was not really happening. Britain started to starve quite literally.

My parents amongst others only survived on the food parcels sent by individual US Citizens to the people of Britain when they found out about the state of Britain and it’s citizens. Some do not realise just how long food rationing went on for and the truely horrific experiments to make production more efficient… This included feeding Chicked droppings back to chickens to make them grow faster, and turning chicken feathers into addatives for bread and much more. Some of which have come back to haunt us like “Mad Cow” and various swine diseases.

Mean while the US politicians behaved in a way that would be shocking to US citizens today if they were taught about it at school. What caused a change in policy was not the plight of the ordinary people in Europe of which both Britain and Germany were perhaps the worst off from the war. The mass starvation, disease, and freezing to death and high criminal activity were of no interest, it was the easy path it gave the communists that scared the US Politicians into action.

Whilst the ERP (Marshall Plan) in the very late 1940’s to early 50’s started improvments it was not a gift and further debts were built up. But British industry had been destroyed beyond recovery, not by bombs or bullets, but by hard use and little maintainance for over a decade, everything was “clapped out” even though from a distance it appeared Britain had infrastructure via the railways the hard reality on the ground was it did not. Also industry for war, is not industry for peace, to change required significant investment. Again US Politicians assumed Britain was sitting on a crock of gold because of the Empire, that in reality was dead, rotting and breaking up.

Thus British politicians discovered they had no freedom any technelogical advance that might have made Britain a world power again got quashed by the US demanding war debt back.

Britain was inovating but as far as US Politicians were concerned in their cold war with the CCCP the US had to appear “all mighty” thus Britain was not alowed to have technical success it had to be US and US alone success. The result amongst other things was the “Brain Drain” and much else. But also Britain was effectively forced to be the US guard post on Europe but without any benifit. Thus Britain incurred even more deleterious debt having to use US manufacturing to make British designed technology, to be used in Britain by US Personnel for mainly US benifit.

As I’ve mentioned before, the first 16bit CPU chips were designed and manufactured in the UK and you will not have heard of them. The reason they were immediately made classified for millitary only usage by the British Government… The same happened with just about every computing advance made, it had to go not into commercial applications, but only into millitary.

Which was why in the 1970s and 1980s when The UK had arguably started the “Home Computer” revelotion, it was founded on US Chips, UK software and the cheapest of injection molded plastic cases as UK industry still could not provide better…

About the only thing to come out of that revelotion that lasted, was some funny little company called Acorn that found it had to design it’s own chips because it could not get what it needed from the at the time “trailing US manufacture”. This design quickly became a leading edge research and got spun off into it’s own section called Acorn RISC/Research Machines (depending on who you ask). ARM as was rather wisely decided that rather than manufacture chips, they would licence the designs for them, and in the process became probably the worlds largest industrial IP entity. Depending on how you measure these things what we now call “arm” is perhaps the most successful of CPU companies with over 160billion chips and most of the “Smart Device” and “mobile phone” market as well as some of the worlds highest performance super computers. So much so it got bought up by a supposadly Japanese tech investment company (SoftBank) backed we now know in part by Chinese money (though the UK Gov it turns out did know this). The result is it’s now in the process of being taken over by a US graphics chip company (Nvidia) who will probably do the usual and either kill it off or “sell bits of it on” effectively breaking the expertise up… With this time the World being the looser, not just the UK.

A word to the wise for technology companies, whilst military contracts might appear lucrative, they mostly destroy the companies and the bits get passed off to “The Favoured Few” in the MIC. So stear well clear and fight any preditory moves.