Brighten Godfrey was one of my officemates when we were grad students at Berkeley. He’s now a highly-successful computer networking professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he studies the wonderful question of how we could get the latency of the Internet down to the physical limit imposed by the finiteness of the speed of light. (Right now, we’re away from that limit by a factor of about 50.)

Last week, Brighten brought to my attention a remarkable document: a 1994 issue of CryptoLog, an NSA internal newsletter, which was recently declassified with a few redactions. The most interesting thing in the newsletter is a trip report (pages 12-19 in the newsletter, 15-22 in the PDF file) by an unnamed NSA cryptographer, who attended the 1992 EuroCrypt conference, and who details his opinions on just about every talk. If you’re interested in crypto, you really need to read this thing all the way through, but here’s a small sampling of the zingers:

Three of the last four sessions were of no value whatever, and indeed there was almost nothing at Eurocrypt to interest us (this is good news!). The scholarship was actually extremely good; it’s just that the directions which external cryptologic researchers have taken are remarkably far from our own lines of interest.

There were no proposals of cryptosystems, no novel cryptanalysis of old designs, even very little on hardware design. I really don’t see how things could have been any better for our purposes. We can hope that the absentee cryptologists stayed away because they had no new ideas, or even that they’ve taken an interest in other areas of research.

Alfredo DeSantis … spoke on “Graph decompositions and secret-sharing schemes,” a silly topic which brings joy to combinatorists and yawns to everyone else.

Perhaps it is beneficial to be attacked, for you can easily augment your publication list by offering a modification.

This result has no cryptanalytic application, but it serves to answer a question which someone with nothing else to think about might have asked.

I think I have hammered home my point often enough that I shall regard it as proved (by emphatic enunciation): the tendency at IACR meetings is for academic scientists (mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, and philosophers masquerading as theoretical computer scientists) to present commendable research papers (in their own areas) which might affect cryptology at some future time or (more likely) in some other world. Naturally this is not anathema to us.

The next four sessions were given over to philosophical matters. Complexity theorists are quite happy to define concepts and then to discuss them even though they have no examples of them.

Don Beaver (Penn State), in another era, would have been a spellbinding charismatic preacher; young, dashing (he still wears a pony-tail), self-confident and glib, he has captured from Silvio Micali the leadership of the philosophic wing of the U.S. East Coast cryptanalytic community.

Those of you who know my prejudice against the “zero-knowledge” wing of the philosophical camp will be surprised to hear that I enjoyed the three talks of the session better than any of that ilk that I had previously endured. The reason is simple: I took along some interesting reading material and ignored the speakers. That technique served to advantage again for three more snoozers, Thursday’s “digital signature and electronic cash” session, but the final session, also on complexity theory, provided some sensible listening.

But it is refreshing to find a complexity theory talk which actually addresses an important problem!

The other two talks again avoided anything of substance. [The authors of one paper] thought it worthwhile, in dealing [with] the general discrete logarithm problem, to prove that the problem is contained in the complexity classes NP and co-AM, but is unlikely to be in co-NP.

And Ueli Maurer, again dazzling us with his brilliance, felt compelled, in “Factoring with an Oracle” to arm himself with an Oracle (essentially an Omniscient Being that complexity theorists like to turn to when they can’t solve a problem) while factoring. He’s calculating the time it would take him (and his Friend) to factor, and would like also to demonstrate his independence by consulting his Partner as seldom as possible. The next time you find yourself similarly equipped, you will perhaps want to refer to his paper.

The conference again offered an interesting view into the thought processes of the world’s leading “cryptologists.” It is indeed remarkable how far the Agency has strayed from the True Path.

Of course, it would be wise not to read too much into this: it’s not some official NSA policy statement, but the griping of a single, opinionated individual somewhere within the NSA, who was probably bored and trying to amuse his colleagues. All the same, it’s a fascinating document, not only for its zingers about people who are still very much active on the cryptographic scene, but also for its candid insights into what the NSA cares about and why, and for its look into the subculture within cryptography that would lead, years later, to Neal Koblitz’s widely-discussed anti-provable-security manifestos.

Reading this document drove home for me that the “provable security wars” are a very simple matter of the collision of two communities with different intellectual goals, not of one being right and the other being wrong. Here’s a fun exercise: try reading this trip report while remembering that, in the 1980s—i.e., the decade immediately preceding the maligned EuroCrypt conference—the “philosophic wing” of cryptography that the writer lampoons actually succeeded in introducing revolutionary concepts (interactive proofs, zero-knowledge, cryptographic pseudorandomness, etc.) that transformed the field, concepts that have now been recognized with no fewer than three Turing Awards (to Yao, Goldwasser, and Micali). On the other hand, it’s undoubtedly true that this progress was of no immediate interest to the NSA. On the third hand, the “philosophers” might reply that helping the NSA wasn’t their goal. The best interests of the NSA don’t necessarily coincide with the best interests of scientific advancement (not to mention the best interests of humanity—but that’s a separate debate).