From: frissell@panix.com (Duncan Frissell)
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 94 04:35:29 PDT
To: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
Subject: Re: Key length security (calculations!)
Message-ID: <199407151135.AA04051@panix.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 03:28 AM 7/15/94 EDT, solman@MIT.EDU wrote:

>The bottom line is that NSA has demonstrated that they can outperform
>academia without public reviews of their method (LEAFs aside for the
>moment [government agencies are after all required to do several stupid
>things each year])
>

That is, they were able to out-perform the private sector when there was no
economic value in cryptography so no one (save them) had any incentive to
practice it.  Since crypto gained enormous economic value (for compression
and general bit manipulation as well as system security) they are unlikely
to be able to keep up.  Note the Market vs the Feds in electronics.  They
tend to buy most of their stuff from us these days.

DCF