An interesting datapoint I've always had on this question: Back in 1975
or so, a mathematician I knew (actually, he was a friend's PhD advisor)
left academia to go work for the NSA. Obviously, he couldn't say
anything at all about what he would be doing.
The guy's specialty was algebraic
On May 8, 2008, at 19:08, Leichter, Jerry wrote:
An interesting datapoint I've always had on this question: Back in
1975
or so, a mathematician I knew (actually, he was a friend's PhD
advisor)
left academia to go work for the NSA. Obviously, he couldn't say
anything at all about what he
On 2008-05-09, Matt Blaze wrote:
The guy's specialty was algebraic geometry - a hot field at the time.
This is the area of mathematics that studied eliptic curves many
years before anyone realized they had any application to
cryptography. [...]
I've heard similar recollections of
During the 1980's and 1990's crypto wars, an occasional topic of
speculation was
just how much the NSA was ahead of the open/public/academic
cryptography research
community in cryptanalysis and cipher design. We wondered (and still
wonder)
whether the NSA was merely a strong center of
