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NSA Cryptography References?
tqft asks: "As an amateur crypto freak I am interested in the NSA. I have been following them on and off for years. Having read 'Body of Secrets' by James Bamford while I got a good feel for some of the history particularly ELINT and political maneuverings, I am interested in finding a more thorough book, article(s), links on their cypto work. Anyone know of good references on their crypto work? Yes I know they don't publish per se, but the references to what has been published are out there somewhere."
http://www.nsa.gov/museum/tour.html
The USPTO lists 105 patents assigned to the NSA. They're not all related to cryptography (some have to do with data capture, analysis, etc.) but a number are.
I drive past the NSA National Cryptologic Museum on the way to work every day.
Can't say I've actually seen what it has to offer...
While not NSA centric, Bruce Schneier's Applied Crytography is a great practical overview of crypto in general, with lots of practical examples and code.
Eschew Obfuscation
If you're near the NSA, you should go check out the NSA Crypto museum. Not only is the museum really interesting, but they have a wonderful library. The library is full of crypto material of all sorts. It's a public library, so have fun!
The book on the history of cryptography is David Kahn's The Codebreakers. If you haven't read it, you should.
You can't forget Bamford's first book, Puzzle Palace either. The earlier history of the NSA.
For starters, check out
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/
Most material is second hand, but as you read, you get a good feel of things.
There's also a huge amount of garbage there.
I've been a subscriber, most of the time, since 1994, although it usually isn't a good idea to post unless you have a lot of time to fight with a bunch of nuts.That said, it is a very good source of opinions, and once in a great while something very interesting happens (RC4 was disclosed anonymously a log time ago, for instance).
I forget what 8 was for.
Obviously, 99% of the stuff NSA does is not published publicly. However, there are a few things you can look at. First, as others have noted, NSA has a lot of patents. Secondly, there are a few NSA designed algorithms which have become well known publicly, including: DES, Skipjack, DSA, SHA-1, SHA-256, and SHA-512 (you can find information about all of these on NIST's web page). However, keep the following things in mind: In all cases, the NSA knew that these algorithms would be public, and so they almost certainly didn't use their best tricks in designing the algorithms. Also, to the best that anyone knows, the military still mostly uses stream ciphers. Nobody has ever seen an NSA designed stream cipher.
Applied Cryptography has a couple thousand references. Some are old NSA publications. It's a good book to have anyway.
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For instance, Skipjack and KEA (don't overlook KEA, it's much more interesting than Skipjack; it's a bit complicated, but you can see some REALLY cool stuff in there).
If you're interested in more than just security analyses of algorithms, check out some of the stuff the NSA did during the AES selection process, like this.
You can also check out the cryptological museum run by the NSA near Columbia, Maryland. There are documents on design and implementation of encryption devices all over the place; for instance, SIGSALY, the first digital voice encryption system, used World War II!
Finally, check out patents! The NSA has the patent secrecy act behind it; they've classified a number of applications, only to declassify them later. Patent applications for the above-mentioned digital voice encryption system were declassified in the 1970s. A patent application on an Enigma-like rotor encryption device was declassified a just few years ago. This should give you an idea of what the NSA might have been working on.
If you want to meet real NSA cryptographers, you can go to the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, colloquially known as the "Oakland conference" because it's held at the beautiful Claremont resort hotel. Here's a review of last year's conference.