Enigma-like Device Patent Granted - 67 Years Later

Thanks to Bruce Schneier ^[?] of Counterpane fame for sending in this tidbit. The US Patent Office has granted William Friedman a patent for an Engima-like device - the catch is that he filed in 1933. Still it's a cool vintage piece of crypto - and I also noticed that a gallery copy of Bruce's new book is on eBay. 'Course, you could wait just a few weeks and buy a new one, but hey - if you gotta have it now, you gotta have it.

Comments

Cryptographic references

[rjh]

Alfred J. Menezes, Handbook of Applied Cryptography.

Schneier, Bruce. Applied Cryptography, Second Edition.

Kissinger, Henry. Collected writings. If you want to know crypto, you also need to know the political climate which created crypto; and when it comes to Cold War history, nobody tells it like Kissinger.

The ICSA Guide to Cryptography. Very light, but it's good for a beginner's introduction.

Kahn, David. The Codebreakers.

Bamford, James. The Puzzle Palace.

Gaily, Jean-Loup. The Data Compression Handbook (? on the name; it's been a while).

Knudson, Jonathan. Java Cryptography.

Elliote, Rusty (?). Java I/O.

Halsall, Fred. Can't think of the name for the life of me, but it's a monstrously big book about network communications. Very good stuff, even if it only has one chapter on communications security.

Re:Why so late?

[freebe]

The USPTO uses an advanced inventory system, different from both FIFO (first-in, first-out) and LIFO (last-in, first-out). The new system is called FISH, and is rumoured to stand for First-In, Still-Here...

But the NSA didn't exist in 1933!!!!

[porkchop_d_clown]

My guess to the lateness of the patent is the NSA thought encryption should be controlled solely by them, and so they just wrapped the thing up in red tape and left it. Why wait 'til 2000 to let it be patented though? Why not 10-20 years ago when computers were clearly far superior in encryption methods?

Ummm... Question?

How could the NSA have suppressed a patent or, for that matter, be assigned a patent, on something that was filed a good 18 years before the NSA was founded?!?

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Some information and thoughts

[Signail11]

You can read the patent for yourself at http://www.patents.ibm.com/details?&pn=US06097812_ _&s_all=1 complete with cross-references. In my opinion, the reason that best explains why the patent has just been issued now is that back in 1933 when Friedman filed for the patent, the information was immediately classified for a set period of time as a matter of course. The FOIA and related executive orders have mandated automatic declassification after 50 years unless it can be demonstrated that disclosure would have a directly detrimental effected on national security. Oddly enough, cryptoanalytical and cryptographic secrets are *explicitly exempt* from this automatic declassification system. Moreover, it's probably quite likely that de/reclassification efforts rank rather low among the NSA priorities. It's entirely possible that they simply never got around to it until now.

Now for the more speculative reason. The academic/civilian cryptographic research community has never successfully developed a general method for cryptanlysing rotor machines; basically, the limits of what we know how to break is the Enigma with knowledge of the rotor wirings and the SIGABA/ECM systems with knowledge of their rotor wirings. True, there have been vague descriptions of the cryptanalysis of Purple, but the key steps (ie. reconstruction of wirings, and far more importantly, determination of the general structure of the machine without obtaining it) have never been declassified. Rotor machines were very commonplace until about the early sixties; moreover, their descendants, shift register based stream ciphers were probably in use to this day. It's pretty safe to say that there are entire categories of cryptanalytic and cipher design techniques that we are ignorant about.

The sci.crypt newsgroup has a long thread about the patent which can be read, among other places, at http://www.remarq.com/read/cryptsci/q_RGaGOxKZQUC- -Jw#LR.

Patents, Patents, Patents

[webword]

A law firm (Oppedahl & Larson LLP) owns patents.com. There is actually some good stuff there. And of course, there is always Freepatents.org, IBM's Gallery of Obscure Patents, and O'Reilly's list of Controversial Patents.

BZZT!

[freebe]

First of all, they granted the NSA the patent, not this guy. If you look at the "applicant" field you'll see that it says "The United States as represented by the NSA". Secondly, that explains why it took 67 years - the information in it was classified(!) and it took 67 years for it to be declassified to the point where the patent could be granted. Gotta hand it to the NSA.

Re:If only we had known about this earlier...

[Detritus]

I wonder how patent lawyers would have fared against the German army.

Why don't we give it a try? :-)

Those of you who don't know Bruce...

[The_Messenger]

...should check out his very excellent book Applied Cryptography , which is a great introduction, reference, and all-around good read for coders who would like to know more about cryptography in general and how to implement common algorithms. It's got the history, theory, protocols -- really a nice thing to have. And unlike many of these type of books, it is perfectly approachable to those of us who are programming wizards but never really cared for mathematics.

IIRC the book's examples are in C. A decent companion text is Java Cryptography (O'Reilly), which while light on theory, is a fairly good tutorial in use of the java.security package's crytographic classes. Unfortunately the book is rather shallow (read the reviews on Amazon for elaboration) and also rather dated; do not expect to find coverage of JCE 1.2 (Java Cryptography Extension) or other recent (year < 1.0) releases.

I'd love to hear others' favorite cryptology-related books.

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Re:My new patent

[evanbd]

I have a decryption algorithm. It seems to fail at exact decryption, but seems to get the general gist across.

313373 5cr1pt k1ddi3 -> Can someone help me with this install script?

g0t 2007 -> still working on this one. As best I can tell, it's gibberish.

m3 hax0r 0x900d -> Red Hat works! wow! and I have root access! this kicks ass!

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More on Friedman's inventions

[Colin Simmonds]

According to The Codebreakers by David Kahn, this must be one of several cryptographic-related inventions Friedman made. In 1956, Congress gave Friedman $100,000 in compensation for the profits lost because several of his inventions were classified. On page 391, Kahn says:

Involved were nine inventions made from 1933 to 1944, two with Rowlett's aid, though the bill was not limited to them. Two were so secret that no patent applications had ever been filed. Four are held in secrecy in the Patent Office: three of these pertained to the Converter M-134-C, a rotor machine, and one to the Converter M-228. Three have been issued as patents: a strip form of the Jefferson cylinder; the Converter M-325, another rotor machine; and a facsimile enciphering system.

I presume that this is the first of the four patents held in the Patent Office, which implies that three more will appear over the next few years. This is one of the rotor machines, but I'm not sure which of them it is. I'm really curious about the inventions so secret that they never had a patent application for them.

Near as I can tell from a quick glance through the book, in 1933 Friedman would have been working for a cryptographic section of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, to which I suppose the NSA is today's successor.

My new patent

[slickwillie]

I just received a patent on my encryption engine. It translates plain English into undecipherable Hacklish. For example,

elite script kiddie -> 313373 5cr1pt k1ddi3
got milk? -> g0t 2007?
I'm a uber hacker -> m3 hax0r 0x900d

I'm currently working on the decryption algorithm, anyone wanna help?