IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Fall 2014 - 9

COMMENTARY

To Let Them Monitor
or Not ... Perhaps that is
Not the Real Question

T

he United States is now debating the wisdom of limits on monitoring by the National
Security Agency (NSA). While the privacy/
security tradeoffs for even passive monitoring are complicated, articles on Google have suggested that the NSA's activities are more intrusive than
previously thought. There is increasing evidence that
NSA may be interfering with secured Internet transactions by using a backdoor attack [1],1 "a method
of bypassing normal authentication, securing illegal
remote access to a computer, obtaining access to
plaintext, and so on, while attempting to remain undetected." for example, the U.S. NSA appears to have
been connected to a recent backdoor attack involving
the random number generator (RNG) used in virtually every Internet transaction. This is reminiscent of
the celebrated backdoor believed to have occurred in
1941 when the fBI "borrowed" codebooks from the
Japanese consulate in Manhattan. I will explain in
this article the role cryptography plays in our everyday lives, the current involvement of the NSA, and
suggest a possible intrusion by them on our privacy
which is hinted at in articles posted on Google.
After completing graduate school in 1960, I
became a Research Staff Member at the IBM Thomas
J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY.
Six years later, the IBM Corporation entered the cryptographic business when Lloyd's Banking Group
contracted with IBM to design a remote-terminaloriented banking system. It led to the now ubiquitous
Automated Teller Machines (ATM) at which cash dispensing and related banking transactions could be carried out. Until the application of encryption in ATM
1

The term trap door in [1, section II] is a synonym of backdoor.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2014.2345171
Date of publication: 17 September 2014

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

|

fALL 2014

ALAN G.
KONHEIM

transactions, the only kid on the block with cryptographic competence was the NSA.
The business advantages of ATM-oriented banking
were obvious to the banking community. It could be
1) available 24/7, 2) implemented outside of the banks
at point-of-sales terminals in hotels or supermarkets,
and 3) ATMs would not unionize nor require medical or
retirement benefits. ATM banking was profitable for the
banks and simplified cash management of vacations.
While soda and cigarettes had long been dispensed
by machines, banks were uncomfortable with dispensing
cash. The banks insisted the customer be authenticated
before an ATM transaction proceeded further. To address
the bank's concerns, IBM proposed ATM-authentication employing two cryptographically related customer
identifiers. A customer would begin by inserting the
bank card into the ATM terminal which would read the
first customer identifier, the Personal Account Number
(PAN). Next, the customer enters at a keyboard the second identifier, the Personal Identification Number (PIN).
Cryptography provided the proper relationship between
the PAN and PIN which was verified to enable a transaction. Banks warned customers to keep their PINs secret,
and not to write them on their bank card.
In 1970, I managed a group in the Mathematical
Sciences Department at the IBM Yorktown Research
Center. Its task was to evaluate the appropriate encryption coding. Cryptography would become the focus of
my professional life for over forty years.
Cryptography uses an algorithm to encode the
original plaintext data into ciphertext, with the goal of
completely disguising the original message. To achieve
secrecy, every cryptographic algorithm requires a key.
Until 1978, all cryptographic coding schemes were
symmetric; if a plaintext message is encrypted with
key K, the same key suffices to decipher the ciphertext
and recover the original data. The number of possible
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