OSEC

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Subject: Re: AES winner?
From: David Honig (honigsprynet.com)
Date: Tue Oct 03 2000 - 10:21:57 CDT

At 07:24 PM 10/2/00 -0400, John Young wrote:
>The AES Q&A notes that the technology will be used
>to protect non-classified government material. What
>cryptosystems are used to protect classified information
> -- that is, either with hardware implementation or with
>software only? Or are these methods themselves
>classified?

The NSA has always been rather interested in tamper-resistant,
tamper-evident, reverse-engineering-resistant, and self-destructing
circuits. Its evident in their patents, and in the self-destruct
policies of certain modules aboard satellite launches (there was
some ruckus a few years ago about some chinese post-boom litter-collection..)

And Skipjack was classified (though for public use!) at first. (For
good reason, as civilian analysts later showed.)

If you have the level of physical & NS-based control they do,
security-by-obscurity is relatively cheap and occasionally effective,
wouldn't you think? Particularly if they changed algorithms or
algorithm parameters (e.g., replace Blowfish's Pi table with another
random 4kbyte table) occasionally.

(all speculation)

"The electron, in my judgment, is the ultimate precision-guided munition."
        -John Deutsch, CIA Director