Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
performance anxiety based on key size would become a recurrent theme
in cryptographic culture.
Cryptography and National Security
The successive publication of David Kahn's
The Codebreakers
in 1967, Feis-
tel's overview of Lucifer in
Scientific American
in 1973, Diffie and Hellman's
“New Directions” in 1976, the DES standard in 1977, and the RSA paper
in 1978 fostered the rapid development of an academic cryptographic
research community. It gathered in August 1981 at the University of Cali-
fornia, Santa Barbara, for the first academic conference devoted to crypto-
graphic research, CRYPTO '81. The following year, a group of attendees,
including David Chaum, Whitfield Diffie, and David Kahn, met to estab-
lish the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR).
19
The conferences were the theater of some dramatic exchanges between
this burgeoning community and the NSA, which viewed with increasing
anxiety public dissemination and discussion of technologies with direct
relevance to national security.
20
The NSA warned the community that
public presentations of cryptographic research might be in possible viola-
tion of the 1954 Munitions Control Act. It followed up with attempts to
control researchers' NSF funding.
21
In 1982, then director of the NSA
Admiral Bobby Imann proposed a truce to the community in the form of
a
mandatory review agreement
, arguing that
If the scientists did not agree to the voluntary review of their work by the intelli-
gence agencies, they would face a “tidal wave” of public outrage that will lead to
laws restricting the publication of scientific work that the government might con-
sider “sensitive” on national security grounds. . . . Imann warned a meeting of the
AAAS that “the tides are moving, and moving fast, toward legislated solutions that
in fact are likely to be much more restrictive, not less restrictive, than the voluntary
censorship system.”
22
Such warnings stood in stark contrast to the cryptographic commu-
nity's embrace of the scientific ethos of open communication: David
Kahn's report on CRYPTO '82 features a picture of a broadly smiling Adi
Shamir shaking hands with Len Adleman (respectively, the S and A of
RSA), congratulating him over the break of the Graham-Shamir knapsack
public-key algorithm.
23
The handshake powerfully symbolized the new
ethics of codemaking and codebreaking, activities now openly performed
