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Inventors of RSA win Turing Award
Frisky070802 writes "The NY Times has an article on how Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman (the inventors of the eponymous RSA public-key encryption algorithm) have won the ACM's Turing award for contributions to computer science. You mean they didn't win already?"
The patent only just expired.
Inventors of RSA win Turing Award
So, like, the ACM committee talked to Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman over a teletypewriter and were convinced that all three were human?
Or does this mean that each of the three are, at any one time, in only of of a finite number of possible states, and can compute any computable function with their (poissibly infinite length) tapes?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Meanwhile, Verisign made a killing off charging an arm and a leg for SSL certificates. In order to support a wide variety of browsers, you needed to support the oldest certificates, and Verisign, a division of RSA, created both the need and the solution for themselves.
I agree that RSA was a wonderful creation. The fact that it was patented, and that these sly companies were able to abuse that for millions upon millions of dollars was a horrible shame in contrast.
Anyone know what day-to-day involvment R. S. and A. had in the companies that profited from their algorithm?
And any chance that Diffie/Helman or other luminaries will be recognized for their similar contributions to the field? Contributions that were not as recognized because they made their discoveries available to all?
I have found a truly remarkable proof that RSA is insecure, but the margin of this comment is too small to contain it.
... with a nod-of-the-head to Fermat and Wiles.)
(
Someone named Gibbs figured this out years earlier, but he worked at the NSA and couldn't tell anyone for a long time.
I've always found it interesting that RSA is so hyped, and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) -- introduced independently by Koblitz and Miller in 1986 -- has received so little attention.
... for an idea that's been around for more than 15 years, and which has made a lot of inroads in academia, it sure hasn't gone too far in industry (Certicom and Motorola being two notable exceptions).
Basically, with a 160 bit key, ECC achieves the same level of security as 1024 bit RSA. (Another example: a 591 bit ECC key is said to possess the same security as 15000+ bit RSA. Hyperelliptic curves may achieve comparable security in even smaller keys, but they remain mostly theoretical due to poor performance and questionable security relative to elliptic curves.) And, because the keys are so much smaller -- and there are efficient techniques for scalar point multiplication over a Galois Field -- ECC tends to offer incredibly good performance.
Unfortunately, the general adoption of ECC just isn't there in the same way as RSA. Mind you, there has been some recent research in which ECC was implemented in OpenSSL (0.9.6b), but I don't think that the SSL 3.0 protocol has been extended to support it yet. Also, there is a tremendous amount of research continuing in this field to improve ECC performance (not just in software, but in elliptic curve processors for smart cards, for instance). And, of course, ANSI, IEEE, and NIST FIPS 180-2 standards are working their way thru the pipes.
But still
Gee, someone has a subscription to the "word-a-day" mailing list.
Computer Science Prize to Honor 3 Forerunners of Internet Security By JOHN MARKOFF he Association of Computing Machinery plans to announce today that Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman will receive the 2002 A. M. Turing Award for their development work in public-key cryptography. The award, which carries a $100,000 prize financed by the Intel Corporation, is given annually to leading researchers in the field of computer science. Working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977, the three men developed the RSA algorithm, which is widely used today as a basic mechanism for secure Internet transactions, as well as in the banking and credit card industries. What's new? The strength of this approach is that it provides highly secure communications over distances between parties that have never previously been in contact. Dr. Rivest now teaches in the electrical engineering and computer science department at M.I.T. Dr. Shamir is a professor in the applied mathematics department at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Dr. Adleman is a professor of computer science and of molecular biology at the University of Southern California.
Computer Science Prize to Honor 3 Forerunners of Internet Security
By JOHN MARKOFF
he Association of Computing Machinery plans to announce today that Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman will receive the 2002 A. M. Turing Award for their development work in public-key cryptography.
The award, which carries a $100,000 prize financed by the Intel Corporation, is given annually to leading researchers in the field of computer science.
Working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977, the three men developed the RSA algorithm, which is widely used today as a basic mechanism for secure Internet transactions, as well as in the banking and credit card industries.
What's new?
The strength of this approach is that it provides highly secure communications over distances between parties that have never previously been in contact.
Dr. Rivest now teaches in the electrical engineering and computer science department at M.I.T.
Dr. Shamir is a professor in the applied mathematics department at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
Dr. Adleman is a professor of computer science and of molecular biology at the University of Southern California.