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February 18, 2012 06:05 pm

John Nash's Declassified 1955 Letter To the NSA


An anonymous reader writes "In 1955, John Nash sent an amazing letter (PDF) to the NSA in order to support an encryption design that he suggested. In it, he anticipates computational complexity theory as well as modern cryptography. He also proposes that the security of encryption can be based on computational hardness and makes the distinction between polynomial time and exponential time: 'So a logical way to classify enciphering processes is by the way in which the computation length for the computation of the key increases with increasing length of the key. This is at best exponential and at worst probably at most a relatively small power of r, ar^2 or ar^3, as in substitution ciphers.'"

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Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/RZNojLLkXps/john-nashs-declassified-1955-letter-to-the-nsa

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