Re: NSA advanced knowledge

received from John Young <jya@pipeline.com>:
>
>Responding to msg by rsalz@osf.org (Rich Salz) on Wed, 24 Jan  
>7:34 PM
 
>>Is there any indication that the NSA knew about 
>>public-key before  it entered the open literature?
>
>
>   Fred B. Wrixon writes in "Codes and Ciphers," under the
>   "Public Key" entry:
>
>      ... This Hellman-Diffie proposal was apparently
>      anticipated by a similar version developed by the
>      National Security Agency (NSA) a decade earlier.
>      (p. 164)
>
>   No citation or elaboration is given for this claim.
>
>   Wrixon's book is a simply written compendium:
>
>      Codes and Ciphers: An A to Z of Covert Communication,
>      from the Clay Tablet to the Microdot.
>      Fred B. Wrixon
>      Prentice Hall, 1992. Paper $18.00
>      ISBN 0-13-277047-4
 
It was originally called FIREFLY or somesuch thing.  I may have some of
the early papers.  (The same ones leading to the statement in the book).
 
This should predate the STU-II to STU-III transition.

David G. Koontz writes:
> >
> >      ... This Hellman-Diffie proposal was apparently
> >      anticipated by a similar version developed by the
> >      National Security Agency (NSA) a decade earlier.
> >      (p. 164)
[...]
> It was originally called FIREFLY or somesuch thing.  I may have some of
> the early papers.  (The same ones leading to the statement in the book).
>  
> This should predate the STU-II to STU-III transition.

I thought that FIREFLY was just the NSA's name for the STS variant
that they use for STU-IIs and STU-IIIs.

Perry