Re: Wikipedia "Cryptography" reaches Featured Article status

"Roger Schlafly" <rogersc1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
"Off the record, NSA has characterized DES as one of their biggest
mistakes. If they knew the details would be released so that people could
write software, they would never have agreed to it."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard

So DES was a mistake because it was followed by research?
Or because the NSA was not able to predict the future very well?
Was it NSA's mistake or NBS's mistake? I assumed that the
quote meant that the mistake had something to do with key
length (either too large or too small). Or maybe that NBS misled
NSA about the project.

From the context it sounds to me that the mistake was the amount of
academic research that took off after DES was standardized, thus
letting the genie of crypto knowledge get out of the "bottle" of spy
agency security. Sorry I didn't have the quote in front of me and
forgot the specific mention of software in it. According to Levy,
when NSA first agreed to work with IBM on Lucifer, one of the NSA's
conditions was that the algorithm would be kept secret and delivered
only in tamperproof chips to customers licensed by the NSA. Sometime
later, after the technical design was a fait accompli, there was an
NBS standardization process and the algorithm ended up being
published. What kinds of political conflicts took place behind the
scenes to let this happen is unknown, but David Kahn says:

[DES] was, in fact, so good that a miniature debate seems to
have broken out in secret between the two halves of the National
Security Agency, which was advising the Bureau of Standards.
The code-breaking side wanted to make sure that the cipher was
weak enough for the NSA to solve it when used by foreign nations
and companies. The code-making side wanted any cipher it was
certifying for use by Americans to be truly good. The upshot was
a bureaucratic compromise. Part of the cipher---the "S-boxes"
that performed a substitution---was strengthened. Another part---
the key that varied from one pair of users to another---was
weakened. In this form the government propsed its adoption as
the Data Encryption Standard for non-national security messages
and files for interfacing with the private sector."
(Kahn, "Cryptology Goes Public", Foreign Affairs (Fall 1979) p. 151).

Once the algorithm was already developed, the economic interest in
standardizing it may have been too powerful for the NSA to
successfully stick to its guns about keeping the algorithm secret. In
that case the NSA may have regretted ever getting involved with
Lucifer in the first place.

I hope you stick to facts. I never heard the blanket story. It sounds
like another urban legend to me. If you find anything, maybe it could
go into the NSA article, because I don't know what it has to do with DES.

I would oppose using the blanket story unless it's verifiable.

Yeah, I noticed that too after adding the passage from the NIST
retrospective but hadn't gotten around to fixing it. Including both
parts of the quote while avoiding that redundancy is certainly a
enough simple editing task.

It is not that simple, because you don't want to give the impression
that NIST was quoting the 2 idiotic sentences that I am challenging.

It's a simple enough matter of just adding something saying that Bruce
made an additional claim.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Wikipedia "Cryptography" reaches Featured Article status
    ... to the idea of a public standard; ... One could easily imagine NSA insiders saying "I think it was ... an awful mistake that the NBS went ahead and did this" -- meaning ... a mistake that the NSA didn't more actively oppose the standardization ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: Wikipedia "Cryptography" reaches Featured Article status
    ... Bruce did not work for NSA. ... the explosion of academic research into crypto that followed the DES ... as described in both the quote itself and in the NIST ... So DES was a mistake because it was followed by research? ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: Wikipedia "Cryptography" reaches Featured Article status
    ... a mistake. ... The introduction of DES is considered to have been a catalyst for the ... NSA has characterized DES as one of their biggest ... Certainly the unkeyed Initial Permutation and Final Permutation make no sense for security or for software, but IIRC, it allows hardware registers to be filled in parallel (or something. ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: Wikipedia "Cryptography" reaches Featured Article status
    ... say that NSA views DES as a mistake or that NSA didn't ... know that people would implement DES in software. ... general sentiment in the NSA is today. ... mistake, but that doesn't rely on inside knowledge of decisions 30-35 ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: Wikipedia "Cryptography" reaches Featured Article status
    ... a mistake. ... The introduction of DES is considered to have been a catalyst for the ... NSA has characterized DES as one of their biggest ... details of the DES algorithm would be published; ...
    (sci.crypt)