rjr@mgweed.UUCP (09/30/83)
There is a book (non-fiction) out called "The Puzzle Palace". It tells all about the goings-on in the NSA (National Security Agency). Towards the end of the book they mention the NSA's involvement with the NBS data encryption standard and how they insisted that it be reduced from 128 to 64 fields (if that's the correct term), otherwise it would take the NSA forever to decode someone's traffic. Cutting it in half reduced the time from days or weeks down to a couple of minutes, as I recall, even using their super-duper computer. The book is quite interesting. For example it tells how NSA built satellite receive sites close to other sites so they could monitor all traffic. It tells about the monitoring equipment "we" had in Iran to monitor Russian space launches. Basically it says the NSA is paranoid about being able to monitor/influence ANY communications.....
shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs) (10/03/83)
I read it several months ago, and found it rather interesting. There's another little fact about the 64-bit DES: there's really nothing to prevent from using two of the DES chips together to effectively have a 128-bit code... I don't know whether this will cause severe problems in conforming to the standard, but if this idea catches on, then it will become a de facto standard... stan the lep hacker utah-cs!shebs
leimkuhl@uiuccsb.UUCP (10/20/83)
#R:mgweed:-382500:uiuccsb:6000004:000:733 uiuccsb!leimkuhl Oct 19 19:20:00 1983 I agree that Bamford's "The Puzzle Palace" is a super book. I read it last spring at about the time I was talking to a NSA recruiter; the book was an excellent balance to the gloss and promise of the NSA spiel. The best thing about this book is that it is not in the least manipulative. While the author clearly has an opinion he is trying to communicate, he is never heavy-handed and he does not resort to the kind of righteous moralizing that characterizes so much of current writing about US intelligence agencies. As the Times says, the book is astonishing for the depth and breadth of information related to the reader. Now that it's in paperback, everyone should have a copy. Ben Leimkuhler (uiucdcs!uiuccsb!leimkuhl)