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NSA Cryptography References?

Posted by Cliff on from the finding-literature-that-isn't-classified dept.

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."

6 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Have you tried their museum? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://www.nsa.gov/museum/tour.html

  2. They do hold patents by pjcreath · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  3. Applied Cryptography by primal39 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  4. Enlist by ikeleib · · Score: 3, Funny

    I think to find out the information you are seeking, you need to work at the NSA in one of the higher echelon positions.

  5. Books by rwash · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  6. Not a whole lot by randombit · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.