TheCodeBreakers
engineers working on peripheral components, such as line printers and
punched-card inputs, must strain to keep up with basic technology.
N.S.A. leads even such firms as I.B.M. and Remington Rand in important
areas of computer development, such as time-sharing, and industry has
adopted many N.S.A.-designed features.
The second section, STED (for "Standard Technical Equipment
Development") conducts basic cryptographic research. It looks for new
principles of encipherment. It ascertains whether new developments in
technology, such as the transistor and the tunnel diode, have
cryptographic applications. Using such esoteric tools as Galois field
theory, stochastic processes, and group, matrix, and number theory,
________*w».»ui,ai iiiuuci 01 a proposed cipher
machine and will simulate its operation on a computer, thus
producing the cipher without having to build the hardware. Rotor
principles have often been tested for cryptographic strength in this way.
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