Evervault Blog

This Evervault blog post provides a comprehensive account of the discovery and history of differential cryptanalysis, a fundamental technique in cryptographic attack methodology.

Key Findings

The article documents how IBM’s design team for the Data Encryption Standard (DES) in the 1970s received classified guidance from the NSA that specifically hardened DES against differential cryptanalysis — a technique that would not be publicly discovered by academics Eli Biham and Adi Shamir until 1990.

This represents a roughly twenty-year gap between classified government knowledge and public academic understanding of a foundational cryptographic concept.

Relevance

The history of differential cryptanalysis serves as a concrete, well-documented example of government agencies possessing advanced mathematical and technical capabilities far ahead of the private sector and academic community. This pattern is directly relevant to evaluating claims about the Pentagon’s current AI capabilities and its stated need for commercial AI models.