The Alternative History of Public-Key Cryptography (1999)

by gnosis • 16 years ago

81 17 16 years ago

bhickey2• 16 years ago

It was Singh's book got me interested in crypto when I read it in 9th grade, but it really made me smile to revisit this!

Since leaving GCHQ, the NSA, and a hedge fund, Nick works as a genetic anthropologist at the Broad Institute. Last year I had the distinct pleasure of haranguing Nick Patterson with all manner of technical questions, mostly with regards to Hidden Markov Models. He never did mention his role in public-key cryptography. The NYTimes did a bio on him a few years back, it's a great read about an amazing person and intellectual giant.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/science/12prof.html http://www.broadinstitute.org/blog/five-questions-nick-patte...

RiderOfGiraffes• 16 years ago

Simon Singh is the same guy as wrote and produced the documentary on "Fermat's Last Theorem":

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380332

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498494

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646727

He's also a nice guy, and says nice things about my presentations.

srean2• 16 years ago

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/mf_qa_singh/ Wired article about how the British Chiropractic Association went after Singh.

  Simon Singh: It would have meant that whenever somebody
  typed “Simon Singh” into a Web search, it would say,
  “science journalist found guilty of libel.” People could
  dismiss anything I’d ever written about alternative
  medicine. But more important, it would have implied that
  there is some validity to these claims that chiropractic
  can help with things like asthma and colic. And that
  would have an impact on parents and their children. Faced
  with that, I couldn’t apologize. If you’ve written
  something that you believe is true, and if you can afford
  to defend it, then you’ve got to defend it.

bhickey2• 16 years ago

The UK really needs to backport the Zenger Trial.

mnutt2• 16 years ago

I wonder if Clifford Cocks was the inspiration for the passage in Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon, where the rookie NSA employee finds the (zeta?) function that is seeded with the word "COMSTOCK"? Either way, the real history of cryptography is often just as interesting as the fiction written about it.

RickHull• 16 years ago

Comstock is a recurring name throughout Stephenson's works. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle in particular comes to mind.

mnutt2• 16 years ago

Definitely. And the "rookie solves a seemingly impossible math problem without knowing it's supposed to be difficult" is a pretty common archetype, but it seemed like enough details matched that maybe there was a connection.

ikuygtyuiouy• 16 years ago

That's the problem with government research - same problem with the air forces' 1968 moon landing.

jmg• 16 years ago

this is gonna sound silly, but is anyone else scared to visit cryptome? same with wikileaks.

roryokane• 16 years ago

Why would you be scared to visit those sites? What do you think could happen?

lambda• 16 years ago

No. Why would I be scared?

gnosis• 16 years ago

Here's a mirror, if you don't want to visit the original site:

http://cryptome.org.nyud.net/ukpk-alt.htm

huhtenberg• 16 years ago

Clifford Cocks, meet David Huffman...

-- Exhibit A --

Cocks did not fully appreciate the significance of his discovery. He was unaware of the fact that GCHQ's brightest minds had been struggling with the problem for three years, and had no idea that he had made one of the most important cryptographic breakthroughs of the century. Cocks's naivety may have been part of the reason for his success, allowing him to attack the problem with confidence, rather than timidly prodding at it.

-- Exhibit B --

In 1951, David A. Huffman [...] hit upon the idea of using a frequency-sorted binary tree and quickly proved this method the most efficient. In doing so, the student outdid his professor, who had worked with information theory inventor Claude Shannon to develop a similar code.

In other words, as we can clearly see here, it pays to be ignorant :-)

steven• 16 years ago

I wrote about this in Wired some time ago. Here's the link. It's also the subject of the last part--a sort of epilog--to my book Crypto.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.04/crypto_pr.html

I was at Cocks' talk, which was held, appropriately enough, at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and others cracked Nazi Enigma codes. It is really worth a visit if you are in London and have a day to travel. Whit Diffie also shared with me some fascinating stories about his strange relationship with James Ellis, his counterpart in the classifed shadow world.

The Alternative History of Public-Key Cryptography (1999)

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