From: "Perry E. Metzger" <pmetzger@lehman.com>
Date: Mon, 10 May 93 11:06:43 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Early Battles
In-Reply-To: <9305092237.AA11893@netcom3.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <9305101806.AA14984@snark.shearson.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Norman Hardy says:
> I remember hearing an anecdote from a fairly private but
> unclassified source. According to this source NSA was incensed when
> IBM first developed Lucifer for banking applications, especially
> because they published details in a Scientific American article. NSA
> accused IBM of stealing secrets from NSA thru IBM employees having
> access to NSA technology as part of their jobs developing hardware
> and software for NSA. IBM was of course prepared for this
> eventuality. They quoted an early paper by Shannon suggesting that a
> mixture of transpositions and permutations would likely produce
> strong ciphers. This is, of course, the heart of both Lucifer and
> DES.
> NSA backed off.

This sounds like an urban legend -- NSA and IBM worked way too closely
on the development of DES for this to sound likely.

.pm