[47918] in Cypherpunks
NSA advanced knowledge
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Young)
Wed Jan 24 20:50:43 1996
From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996 20:44:39 -0500
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Responding to msg by rsalz@osf.org (Rich Salz) on Wed, 24 Jan
7:34 PM
>Is there any indication that the NSA knew about
>public-key before it entered the open literature?
Fred B. Wrixon writes in "Codes and Ciphers," under the
"Public Key" entry:
... This Hellman-Diffie proposal was apparently
anticipated by a similar version developed by the
National Security Agency (NSA) a decade earlier.
(p. 164)
No citation or elaboration is given for this claim.
Wrixon's book is a simply written compendium:
Codes and Ciphers: An A to Z of Covert Communication,
from the Clay Tablet to the Microdot.
Fred B. Wrixon
Prentice Hall, 1992. Paper $18.00
ISBN 0-13-277047-4
