I wonder how many of the Mythos vulnerabilities / exploits had already been discovered by eg the NSA.
Don’t get me wrong; I still find the discoveries very impressive and frightening. It does also feel different than ‘no human discovered this over X years’ though, because we shouldn’t expect to hear from some of the actors who were most motivated and most capable of finding these. e.g., if the NSA was aware of these, I still wouldn’t expect them to say so.
My cached impression from reading The Code Book is that the intelligence community often won’t disclose that they’d known something, even if that fact has become public.
For instance, RSA encryption, which notably stands for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, was described by them in 1977, but seems to have been separately invented in 1973 within the British government, by someone named Clifford Cocks. But his first-but-nonpublic-invention wasn’t acknowledged until 1997.
I wonder how many of the Mythos vulnerabilities / exploits had already been discovered by eg the NSA.
Don’t get me wrong; I still find the discoveries very impressive and frightening. It does also feel different than ‘no human discovered this over X years’ though, because we shouldn’t expect to hear from some of the actors who were most motivated and most capable of finding these. e.g., if the NSA was aware of these, I still wouldn’t expect them to say so.
My cached impression from reading The Code Book is that the intelligence community often won’t disclose that they’d known something, even if that fact has become public.
For instance, RSA encryption, which notably stands for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, was described by them in 1977, but seems to have been separately invented in 1973 within the British government, by someone named Clifford Cocks. But his first-but-nonpublic-invention wasn’t acknowledged until 1997.