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

Some Links to the NSA site

[Frosty Piss]

Hereâ(TM)s some linkys to the actual NSA website pages that talk about this:

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2012/nash_exhibit.shtml

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/nash_letters/nash_letters1.pdf

Communication as a form of intelligence

[johnwbyrd]

As I read the correspondence I tried to put myself in the position of Dr. Campaigne, and tried to figure out whether what Nash was saying made any sense. I confess that Nash's presentational style made me feel as though I was reading what Nash himself referred to as "a crank or circle-squarer". The core of Nash's invention is a squiggly, messy node graph of colored lines demonstrating a manually obfuscated binary function. But the importance of his communication is the importance of P vs. NP functions, which Nash communicated very very obliquely. Nash's Unabomber handwritten font didn't help him either.

I feel bad that I would have made the same mistake that Campaigne did. But I think nearly anyone would have.