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.'"

Comments

Re:This is impossible

[hcs_$reboot]

So you mean that he was probably tired that day and he wanted to send the letter to the NaSA instead?

Hand writing

[CurryCamel]

Reading Nash's letters makes me realize how much better presentation medium powerpoint is.
And also how much junk is made to sound nice, just with a nice presentation.

(Read all of it) Nash gets form letter rejection

[measure]

After Nash invents modern cryptography, explains it quite eloquently in a few pages of hand written notes, and designs and builds an electronic machine that automatically encrypts / decrypts the messages. He is then sent form letter rejection by the government: "It has been found that cryptographic principles involved in your system, although ingenous, do not meet the necessary requirements for official application."