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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?"
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
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.
The patent just expired, so it is now possible to incorporate the result in further scientific work, as per the scientific tradition, without involving the lawyers. Only now is it appropriate to treat the development as a pure scientific achievement.