30 Years of Public Key Cryptography

An anonymous reader writes "Public key crypto turned 30 last night, and the biggest names in crypto turned out to celebrate at an event hosted at the Computer History Museum. Voltage Security teamed with RSA to bring together some of the most famous cryptographers of yesterday (Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman) and today (Dan Boneh), along with luminaries Ray Ozzie, Brian Snow, and Jim Bidzos. From the ZDNet article: 'NYT reporter John Markoff, who has covered Silicon Valley for 30 years, was master of ceremonies, and started off by saying that no technology has had a more profound impact than cryptography, and that public-key cryptography has been underappreciated for its role in the Internet. Without public key cryptography, ecommerce would be an idea as opposed to an enabler of billions of daily transactions.' You can view the podcast and pictures of the event at the Voltage Security site.."

Comments

first papers on PKC

[ei4anb]

It was a fun time.

I was a math undergrad interested in large prime numbers and numerical computing when the first hints on what RS&A were doing came out in Scientific American. At that time I had only 3 years programming experience and it was a big thrill to get a public key crypto email system working (first in Pascal on a DEC-20) but I only distributed it to a small group as the university was not yet on the Internet.

I told the story to PZ at a conference about 8 years ago and we had a good laugh wondering how things might have developed differently had that program been distributed on Usenet by someone outside the USA!