Pre-cursor to Non-Secret Encryption
James Ellis, GCHQ, in his account of the development of non-secret encryption credits a Bell Laboratories 1944 report on Project C-43 for stimulating his conception: http://www.cesg.gov.uk/publications/media/nsecret/possnse.pdf The Possibility of Secure Non-Secret Digital Encryption J. H. Ellis, January 1970 Reference: (1) Final report on project C43. Bell Telephone Laboratory, October, 1944, p.23. The Bell lab paper appears not to be online. Brian Durham notes that NSA has listed in its Open Door archive of declassified crypto papers several of which refer to a Project C-43 which investigated from 1941-1944 decoding of speech codes. http://www.nsa.gov/programs/opendoor/narafindaid.html NR 4242 ZEMA172 35374A 19410521 PROJECT C-43 PRELIMINARY REPORTS NR 4243 ZEMA172 35375A 19411215 PROJECT C43 PRELIMINARY AND PROGRESS REPORTS NR 4675 ZEMA43 21276A 19430130 PROJECT C-43 CONTINUATION OF DECODING SPEECH CODES NR 3391 CBPM44 24215A 19441012 PROJECT C-43 DECODING SPEECH CODES The date of the last, October 12, 1944, corresponds to that of the Ellis citation. If this is the paper Ellis is referring to, it is worth noting the dates of the earlier reports, two in 1941 and one in 1943. Two other reports in the NSA archive may be related: NR 2416 CBLM17 5452A 19420529 NRDC PROJECT C-32: AC AND EC CASE NO. 22 NR 4674 ZEMA43 21275A 19420131 FINAL REPORT ON PROJECT C-32 SPEECH PRIVACY DECODING, 1942 Brian Durham will get copies of the paper for putting online, but that may take a while. Meanwhile, we would appreciate hearing from anyone who has read the papers or may have copies of them to share for publication. Related: We have a three-year-old FOIA request to NSA for information on: The invention, discovery and development of non-secret encryption (NSE) and public key cryptography (PKC) by United Kingdom, United States, or any other nation's intelligence and cryptology agencies, prior to, parallel with, or subsequent to, the PKC work of Diffie-Hellman-Merkle. NSA has recently said that some responsive information may be released in the near future, although it is not clear if that is weeks or months or years away. - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Pre-cursor to Non-Secret Encryption
John Young [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: James Ellis, GCHQ, in his account of the development of non-secret encryption credits a Bell Laboratories 1944 report on Project C-43 for stimulating his conception: http://www.cesg.gov.uk/publications/media/nsecret/possnse.pdf The URL above does not work. The new one is: http://www.cesg.gov.uk/site/publications/media/nsecret/possnse.pdf Fredrik Henbjork [EMAIL PROTECTED] - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Pre-cursor to Non-Secret Encryption
John Young wrote: James Ellis, GCHQ, in his account of the development of non-secret encryption credits a Bell Laboratories 1944 report on Project C-43 for stimulating his conception: However the concept seems familiar enough - unless I am missing something, a PRNG (n for noise rather than number this time) in sync with a similar PRNG at the recipient end is mixed with the plaintext signal to give a cryptotext; the matching unit subtracts the same values from the received signal to give the original plaintext. If it were digital we would probably xor it :) - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Pre-cursor to Non-Secret Encryption
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Young writes: Related: We have a three-year-old FOIA request to NSA for information on: The invention, discovery and development of non-secret encryption (NSE) and public key cryptography (PKC) by United Kingdom, United States, or any other nation's intelligence and cryptology agencies, prior to, parallel with, or subsequent to, the PKC work of Diffie-Hellman-Merkle. NSA has recently said that some responsive information may be released in the near future, although it is not clear if that is weeks or months or years away. Can you amend that to ask for digital signature information, too? From my research on Permissive Action Links, I think there's some chance that digital signatures were invented separately, possibly by NSA before GCHQ's non-secret encryption work. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me) http://www.wilyhacker.com (2nd edition of Firewalls book) - The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending unsubscribe cryptography to [EMAIL PROTECTED]