Gideon's Sword Read Online Free PDF Page A

Archives at George Washington University. This private archive, the largest in the world outside the Library of Congress, collected vast amounts of government documents, including virtually everything being routinely declassified as part of the Mandatory Declassification Review: the government’s program for declassifying documents under several laws requiring them to do so. A veritable Amazon of information flowed into this archive on a daily basis.
    Via the GSA computer, Gideon sent an automated request to the INSCOM secure archive at George Washington via port 6151, directing that a PDF file of a certain classified document be transmitted out through the same port, authorized via General Shorthouse’s passphrase, to be added to a routine dump of Cold War declassified documents headed for the National Security Archives daily batch files. The file was duly transmitted; it passed through the firewall at the sole authorized port, where the passphrase was examined and approved; and the document was subsequently routed to George Washington University and stored with millions of others in one of the archive databases.
    Thus, Gideon had successfully arranged for the erroneous declassification of a classified document and hid it within a huge stream of data leaving the secure government perimeter. Now all that remained was to retrieve the document.
     
    The next morning, at around eleven, a certain rumpled yet undeniably charming visiting professor by the name of Irwin Beauchamp, dressed in tweeds, mismatched corduroys, beaten-up wing tips, and a knitted tie (thirty-two dollars; Salvation Army) entered the Gelman Library at George Washington University and requested a slew of documents. His identity was not yet in the system and he had lost his temporary library card, but a kindly secretary took pity on the scatterbrained fellow and allowed him access to the system. Half an hour later, Beauchamp departed the building with a slender manila folder under his arm.
    Back in the motel, Gideon Crew spread out the papers from the folder with a trembling hand. The moment of truth had arrived—the truth that would make him either free, or merely more miserable.

6
A Critique of the Thresher Discrete Logarithm Encryption Standard EVP-4: A Theoretical Back-Door Cryptanalysis Attack Strategy Using a Group of φ-Torsion Points of an Elliptic Curve in Characteristic φ.
    G ideon Crew had studied plenty of advanced mathematics in college and, later, at MIT, but the math in this paper was still way over his head. Nevertheless, he understood enough to realize what he had in his hands was the smoking gun. This was the memo his father had written to critique Thresher, the memo his mother said had been destroyed. Yet it hadn’t been. Most likely, the bastard responsible—believing it too difficult or risky to destroy the document outright—had stuck it into an archive he believed would never be declassified. After all, what American general in the era of the Berlin Wall would have believed the Cold War could ever end?
    He continued reading, heart racing, until, finally, he came to the final paragraphs. They were written in the dry language of science-speak, but what they said was pure dynamite.
In conclusion, it is the author’s opinion that the proposed Thresher Encryption Standard EVP-4, based on the theory of discrete logarithms, is flawed. The author has demonstrated that there exists a potential class of algorithms, based on the theory of elliptic functions defined over the complex numbers, which can solve certain discrete logarithm functions in real-time computing parameters. While the author has been as yet unable to identify specific algorithms, he has demonstrated herein that it is possible to do so.
The proposed Thresher standard is therefore vulnerable. If this standard is adopted, the author believes that, given the high quality of Soviet mathematical research, codes developed from this standard could be broken within a relatively