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NSA Rubicon
NSA cryptanalist
Peter Alan Jenks (19 December 1924 - 3 October 1989)
was a mathematician and cryptanalist of the US
National Security Agency (NSA).
He was born on 12 December 1924 in Paris (France) and grew
up in the US in Cambridge (MA) and Michigan.
He was a Harvard graduate and served in the US Navy in the Atlantic
and the Pacific during World War II (WWII).
Shortly after the war, in 1949, he joined the NSA where he worked
for 30 years as a cryptomathematician and cryptanalyst [1].
In the mid 1960s, Peter Jenks became involved in what would later become known
as Operation RUBICON,
the secret purchase of the Swiss crypto manufacturer
Grypto AG (Hagelin) by the CIA
and the German BND, with the aim to spy on its customers [2].
He became the architect of what
we now know as a backdoor;
the deliberate weaking of a cipher algorithm with the aim to break it
more easily if you know where to look. He first tried it on the
mechanical Hagelin CX-52, before moving on
to electronic cipher machines based on electronic shift registers,
such as the H-460.
In 1975, he received the Exceptional Civilian Service Award for his
groundbreaking work at the NSA. In mid-1979, whilst developing
the next generation of backdoors
for Operation RUBICON,
he abrubtly left the NSA and retired at the age of 54.
He died on 3 October 1989, aged 64, at Mercy Hospital in Baltimore (MD)
of myelofibrosis, a bone marrow disorder [1].
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Related subjects on this website
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- At NSA there is the Peter Jenks Community Service Award.
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Unreleased and undated draft copy.
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© Crypto Museum. Created: Thursday 03 February 2022. Last changed: Friday, 04 February 2022 - 10:08 CET.
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