Applications and the Future - Codes: The Guide to Secrecy from Ancient to Modern Times - page 371

9.6 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Compliance
I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason
and compare: my business is to create.
— William Blake (1757-1827), English poet
— from Jerusalem (1815 Chapter 1; plate 10, l. 20)
We conclude this chapter with a section on applications of PKC to a modern-
day phenomenon given by the title. This was very much a real part of negotia-
tions in the last century when the cold war between the United States and the
former Soviet Union were under way to limit nuclear bomb testing.
We begin with a brief biographical description of the man responsible for
the idea of usingPKC for the application in the title of this section.
Gustavus J. Simmons was born on October 27, 1930 in Ansted, West Vir-
ginia. His educational background includes a B.S. in mathematics from New
Mexico Highlands University, Las Vegas, in 1955, an M.S. from the University
of Oklahoma at Norman in 1958, and a Ph.D. in 1969 from the University of
New Mexico, Albuquerque. In 1986, he received both the U.S. Government's
E.O. Lawrence Award, and the Department of Energy Weapons Recognition of
Excellence Award for “Contributions to the Command and Control of Nuclear
Weapons”. In May 1991, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Technology
by the University of Lund, Sweden, which recognized his contributions to the
science of communications and to the field of information integrity, in particular.
Simmons spent his workinglife with Sandia National Laboratories from
which he retired in 1993 as a Senior Fellow and the Director for National Security
Studies. His work at Sandia mainly centered around integrity and authentica-
tion issues surroundingnational security, with a special focus on those involving
command and control of nuclear weapons. In 1996 he was made an honourary
Lifetime Fellow of the Institute of Combinatorics and Its Applications. His
many publications were primarily in the areas of combinatorics, graph theory,
information theory, cryptography, especially in the application of asymmetric
encryption techniques and message authentication. His later work was devoted
largely to creating protocols that can be ensured to operate properly, even if
some inputs and/or participants in the protocol may not, themselves, be trust-
worthy.
The followingpresentation is a simplified version of an idea created by Sim-
mons in the late 1970s and early 1980s, published in a series of papers [253]-
[255], as a means for such countries as the United States and the former Soviet
Union to ban underground nuclear testing and have a treaty in place to verify
compliance usingPKC.
In the scenario below, there is no need for secrecy, only guaranteed authenti-
cation, called authentication without secrecy . What is beingsought is authenti-
cation without covert channels, which means any communication pathway that
was neither designed nor intended to transport data. Covert channels, therefore,
would only be located and employed by adversaries.