From: Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>
Date: Wed, 12 Jul 95 07:28:16 PDT
To: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Subject: Re: QED_jak
Message-ID: <199507121427.KAA09285@panix.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 09:53 AM 7/12/95 -0400, John Young wrote:
>   7-12-95. NYPaper:
>
>
>   "U.S. Tells How It Found Soviets Sought A-Bomb: Discloses
>   Clues That Led to Code-Breaking."
>
>      The American intelligence establishment today unveiled
>      one of its oldest secrets: how a small team of
>      codebreakers found the first clues that the Soviet Union
>      sought to steal the blueprints for the atomic bomb in
>      World War II.  Using just brain power -- no computers,
>      no stolen skeleton keys -- the cryptographers slowly
>      cracked what was thought to be an unbreakable code. 


>      service.  The messages were like a jigsaw puzzle with a
>      billion pieces -- all black. They had been double-coded
>      by a system called a one-time pad -- a unique random
>      code for each message, converting words to numbers in a
>      pattern used only once.                        HOO_doo

Note Julius Rosenberg's code name was "liberal".

The NSA said that the Soviets were using a one-time-pad.  The implication is that sloppy encryption practice caused Soviet code clerks to sometimes reuse the random material thus converting the code into a code book system that could be read.

DCF

"A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared
away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal
the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome
desert thereby. . . . The man is now a man." -- Carlyle