What's Happening?

The article I picked to read was from the CoACM magazine titled “Cyber Security, Nuclear Security, Alan Turing, and Illogical Logic” The article was written by Martin Hellman one of the creators along with Diffie and Merkle of public key cryptography. The first half of the article discusses Hellman and Diffie’s troubles “battling” the National Bureau of Standards (NBS – now called the NIST) and the NSA over the fact that their proprosed Data Encryption Standard’s (DES) key size of 56 bits was not secure enough. Hellman begins by initially believe that the 56-bit key size was a mistake on that would be corrected once addressed, however the NSA states that a larger key size would mean foreign governments, criminals, and terrorists would have an easier time hiding their communications from the NSA while the 56-bit key size would not. The NSA would not concede the 56-bit key size until much later when both sides of the battle learned an important lesson that Hellman would go on to emphasize as “get curious, not furious.” The NSA in 1978 contacted Hellman to review the key size when design proportions for the F-35 fighter jet where stolen and decrypted.

It was very interested to see Hellman’s reflections of his time working in encryption during his 30’s as he is now in his 70’s.