New Directions in Cryptography by Diffie and Hellman (1976) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

New Directions in Cryptography by Diffie and Hellman (1976) [pdf]

www-ee.stanford.edu

Worth mentioning the two just won the 2015 Turing Award:

http://amturing.acm.org/

I actually just recently spoke with Hellman for an interview. He's focusing on educating people about the risk of maintaining nuclear deterrents. Also has a new book out that might not be what you expect:

https://anewmap.com/

Is a recording or transcript of the interview available?

> https://anewmap.com/

Yes, pretty hard to imagine. That said, it looks pretty interesting.

Sorry for the late reply, I wrote it up here (didn't want to self-link in a top level reply):

https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/27/cryptography-pioneer-marty...

Thanks for sharing the Turing Award link; agreed it's noteworthy.

Random: I met Whit Diffie at my brother's wedding a couple years ago. He was charming.

> We stand today on the brink of a revolution in cryptography.

Wow, to be able to make that the lead sentence and it turns out not to be hyperbole!

In some ways, it's an understatement. It's revolutionary, period -- not just for cryptography.

Until then you had to exchange keys ahead of time with known parties. With public/private keys, you became able to do so in real time with arbitrary third parties. I'd gather they knew full well it wouldn't hyperbole.

made a video inspired by this work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEBfamv-_do

Ah that was a cool video! I was showing that to my girlfriend the other day to explain DH to her :)

Also developed in parallel by GCHQ, but they didn't realize the potential and it was classified for 27 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography#Classi...

Or they knew exactly the potential but wanted to keep it to themselves.

Thank you all for your kind words. Martin Hellman

(1976)

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