What does the NSA think of academic cryptographers? | Hacker News Reader

What does the NSA think of academic cryptographers?

scottaaronson.com

229 pointsrobinhouston34 comments

Interesting to do a where-are-they-now with the names here. Don Beaver, for instance --- the "charismatic preacher" --- is now a Sr. Software Engineer at Apple, after a 4-year stint at Google doing stuff like security for GFS.

Ueli Maurer continues to be one of the foremost theoretical cryptographers out there. He is responsible for the notion of indifferentiability, which has been quite useful in designing hashing modes out of block ciphers / compression functions and proving them 'secure'.

In dismissing the "philosophical" research into cryptography, the NSA writer makes the same error of judgement as the business leaders and politicians make in dismissing research into the fundamentals of, say, physics.

The most significant discoveries either come directly from or are built upon foundations of such research.

A comment in a blog offers some potential context - namely that the wider crypto field had rediscovered differential cryptanalysis within the last few years. My understanding is that the public discovery of a previously NSA held technique is the type of stuff that the NSA writer was likely fixating on. Likely, the NSA writer attended the conference to get an idea of if the NSA would be losing another trump card.

It's also possible that the NSA writer may have already heard of all these theoretical debates before.

From the "How to submit an article" section:

N.B. If the following instructions are a mystery to you and your local ADP support is no help, please feel free to call the CRYPTOLOG editor on 963-3123s.

Send a hard copy accompanied by a diskette (either 3.5" or 5.25") to the editor at P0541 in 2E062, Ops. 1, or send via e-mail to mebutle@p.nsa.

For maximum efficiency (as far as possible within the limits of your word processor):

• do not type your article in capital letters

• do not double-space between lines

• but do double-space between paragraphs

• do not indent for a new paragraph

• classify all paragraphs

• do not format an HD diskette as DD or vice-versa

• label your diskette: identify hardware (operating system: DOS or UNIX), density of medium, and word processor

• put your name, organization, building and phone number on the diskette

CRYPTOLOG is published in FrameMaker on a Sun HPW.

If you do not have access to FrameMaker, ASCII format is preferred

If anyone is curious email addresses are divided up based on the directorate you are in. In this case the CRYPTOLOG editor (P02) is under the Analysis and Production Directorate.

Edit: if it isn't obvious, directorates and units under them are assigned letter and number designations so the organizational structure of the NSA isn't immediately obvious to outsiders (i.e. "I work in Q57" vs "I work in the polygraph office")

Where'd you get that info?

He works in the Polygraph Office

So funny to read, and with smart commentary by Aaronson about the divergence of interests between the NSA and the university crypto community.

I have pitched tech to the NSA before, and it seemed like they were more interested in benchmarking the capabilities of the outside world than in actually adopting the technology we were pitching.

>> I have pitched tech to the NSA before, and it seemed like they were more interested in benchmarking the capabilities of the outside world than in actually adopting the technology we were pitching.

That should be step one. They should not be interested in what you were pitching without benchmarking first right?

Yes, but benchmarking appeared to be step one of one total.

I kid! My quantum computation friends had much more success, for a while.

Yes, the commentary on the nationality of each author is definitely in the category of "benchmarking the capabilities of the outside world".

If leaked NSA budget figures are accurate the agency's annual budget is equal to the endowments of Harvard and Stanford combined. I'm therefore inclined to view academia as a farm team for NSA.

Harvard's endowment is $36.4B: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University

Stanford's endowment is $21.4B: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University

NSA's budget is ~$11B: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency

The entire black budget is ~$53B: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-...

Well that still leaves the NSA with much more money per year than Harvard and Stanford combined, although that does not say much about the intellectual output.

Your broader point is well taken (e.g. Harvard's FY14 budget was $4.4B), but no university relies on distributions from its endowment for most of its operating budget. The balance comes mostly from tuition and government funding, with fortunate universities like the two you mention also receiving gifts earmarked for immediate use.

It isn't really that interesting to compare the NSA budget to the Harvard or Stanford budget, because in neither case is the entire budget going to crypto research, nor can we casually assume any sort of percentage equivalency. The question is how much effort is the NSA putting into crypto research vs. the academic community as a whole, and I imagine we don't have a good way to answer that question. Even raw dollars wouldn't necessarily tell the whole story, since the NSA cryptographers probably have an easier time working together on focused tasks, which both lead to more progress on said tasks while at the same time potentially leaving entirely unresearched areas if groupthink/consensus/management says there's no point to researching something. (I would imagine management uses a relatively light touch if a researcher asserts that something needs to be dug into, but groupthink is a inevitable.) Consequently characterization of where they are ahead and potentially where they may even be behind is probably a bit difficult, since the situation is in reality probably very complex and unknowable to anyone outside the NSA.

"The question is how much effort is the NSA putting into crypto research vs. the academic community, and I imagine we don't have a good way to answer that question."

Actually we do. Network-centric warfare, financial market stability, policy planning, diplomacy and law enforcement do not rely on the academic community for the integrity and security of their systems. They do rely on the NSA. Its not unreasonable to infer the NSA access to funding and intellectual talent in the face of a credible threat or worthwhile opportunity is practically unlimited as compared to academia.

Note that the conference happened in 1992.

Non-government cryptography has come a long way and become a lot more practical in the subsequent 22 years.

Minor nitpick: I think you meant "public cryptography" instead of "non-government cryptography".

Differential cryptanalysis was publicly unveiled in 1990; IBM first discovered it in 1974, but NSA came in and classified it.

Differential cryptanalysis was known to the NSA before IBM "discovered" it.

The last two comments are interesting. I am sure someone here knows who wrote the NSA report from the information not redacted.

Agreed.

"My Hungarian-American wife Donna and I spent three weeks in the country [...]." - page 19 of the document.

FWIW, this is much more readable if the CSS justify rule is disabled.

Not sure why you are being down-voted, as this is very much true. If you can't comment on CSS on HN, where can you?

It is presumably being down-voted because it is off-topic; This is not a post about web design.

Sure, CSS is on-topic on HN, just like this article about cryptography is on-topic. However, commenting on the HTTPS certificate particulars of a site with a blog post about CSS would be similarly off-topic in a discussion about that blog post :)

(Personally, I am on the fence about the appropriateness of the comment, but I hope I have shed some light on why others would down-vote it)

Actually, I posted this to suggest to people reading it that they go and disable the justify rule to make it less annoying.

Related[0]:

"Many people with cognitive disabilities have a great deal of trouble with blocks of text that are justified (aligned to both the left and the right margins). The spaces between words create "rivers of white" running down the page, which can make the text difficult for some people to read. This failure describes situations where this confusing text layout occurs. The best way to avoid this problem is not to create text layout that is fully justified (aligned to both the left and the right margins)."

[0] http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/F88.html

Interesting, though the readability problem from the original text has much to do with trying to justify text in a very small column, which means excessive spacing has to be used.

You shouldn't turn on justification without also turning on hyphenation. If you add 'hyphens: auto' and '-moz-hyphens: auto' then it looks much better on Firefox. Chrome doesn't support hyphenation though...

Surprisingly, there hasn't been much discussion of Cryptolog previously.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407036

If you bring in an expert practitioner from any field and plop them down in an academic conference they will have similar notes.

Do you believe the culture has change din the last 20 years?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com