John Nash classified letter to NSA from 1955 released

[YellowSubmarine]

John Nash letter to the NSA from 1955
Highlights from John Nash letter to the NSA

In the letter, John Nash offers a design for an encryption machine that is quite ingenious and is based on the principles of modern cryptography. In it he anticipates several aspects of it way before the rest of the world did – including the idea to use computational complexity to get around the shortcomings of contemporary encryption schemes not based on one-time pads.

He also conjectures that one-way functions exist but their existence will never be proven, essentially predicting that unbreakable asymmetric encryption systems exist, but no such system will be ever proven unbreakable – something that appears to be true so far.

Out of the response he received:

The system which you describe has been very carefully examined for possible application to military and other government use. It has been found that the cryptographic principles involved in your system, although ingenious, do not meet the necessary security requirement for official application.

Well, I'm glad Lt. Col. Gibson doesn't think it's secure enough.


This document gave me the chills. It's quite fascinating, and it gives you insight about this brilliant individual. I honestly love the handwriting.

Have we learned to not be quick in ignoring weird people and people with mental issues? Some of them can be amazingly creative and imaginative, maybe even because of their weirdness and issues, and neither affects their reasoning.

 

[Mikhail]

Well, if you do a little bit more elaborated research about John Nash, not only restricting to that movie and randomly picked links, you will perhaps find out that the guy is kind of brilliant mathematician, know mostly for embedding theorem for Riemann manifolds (among mathematicians) and Nash equilibrium concept (google prisoner dilemma to get details) among economists (mostly). Personally I first time learned about Nash not from the movie, but from economics seminars in college, six years ago. At any rate, regarding your topic - Nash also dedicated part of his spare time constructing the plans of world leadership, contacts with aliens and similar fun stuff. I am not talking about other hard core "social" activities (omitted in the movie, of course).

 

[sojourner]

Nash was a mathematician??? You don't say! I thought he just sang in that group Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Nash equilibrium concept (google prisoner dilemma to get details) among economists (mostly). Personally I first time learned about Nash not from the movie

Well, they did mention the Nash equilibrium in the film, IIRC. If I'm not mistaken they spent a lot of screen time on it, though they weren't pretty specific as to what Nash was really working on.

Thankfully, they said nothing about Riemann manifolds, those things can't be understood without first digesting serious quantities of alcohol.

I think the worst part is when the Nash character implied that he has started taking some medication again. That's unforgivable.

 

[arch101]

I highly recommend the biography by Sylvia Nasar, from which the film borrows it's title. There's SO much more to Nash's story than the film showed. His wife was quite brilliant as well.

 

[scotpens]

Nash was a mathematician??? You don't say! I thought he just sang in that group Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

Made a fine car, too.

 

[sojourner]

Gibson's can be hacked.

 

[Lindley]

NSA's issue is that day-to-day security is not good enough. Given enough time, even RSA can be hacked, and NSA has data which must remain secret for decades.