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Crypto Gurus Diffie, Hellman Win 2015 Turing Award (networkworld.com)
alphadogg writes: Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, whose names have been linked since their seminal paper introduced the concepts of public key encryption and digital signatures some 40 years ago, have been named winners of the $1M A.M. Turing Award for 2015 (a.k.a., the 'Nobel Prize of Computing'). The work of Diffie, formerly chief security officer of Sun Microsystems, and Hellman, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University, has had a huge impact on the secure exchange of information across the Internet, the cloud and email.
Probably the greatest claim to fame for Diffie and Hellman would be the paper "New Directions in Cryptography" which described Diffie-Hellman key exchange and is one of the first public descriptions of strong (or strong for its day) cryptography. (back then most cryptography was controlled by governments, militaries and intelligence agencies).
I cant find a cite but I could swear the government tried to censor Diffie and Hellman and prevent them from publishing their work (or maybe I am thinking of some other cryptographic paper or presentation from that era)
It is about time. The primary Diffie-Hellman key exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange is one of the most basic cryptographic algorithms out there and is still used practically today. The simplest version of it is simple enough that you can explain it to a bright 8th grader. Variants of it, including both the original version and others such as those using elliptic curves are mainstays of practical crypto today.
Moreover, DH key exchange along with RSA started modern crypto in a fundamental way. Prior to that work, the idea was to have the key be completely secret and maximize the fundamental entropy of the encrypted messages, leading to the ultimate logical conclusion of the one-time pad. RSA and DH both showed that instead of relying on high entropy, one can rely on the computational difficulty of actually understanding the order that really is in the encrypted message.
The upshot of DH key exchange is that two people (or computers) have a conversation and at the end of it they will have a shared secret, but no one who is listening even if they hear the entire conversation will have any hope of finding out the shared secret unless they have far more computational power. This is a wildly counterintuitive claim once you hear it, and that lasts for about ten minutes (about as long as it takes to explain their algorithm). It is true that DH iand RSA are both only conjecturally secure, since the difficulty of discrete log and factoring would imply that P != NP (and in fact appear to be much stronger claims), and there are some serious thinkers who have expressed skepticism that such systems really are theoretically secure. (See for example Henry Cohn's short essay here http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cohn/Thoughts/factoring.html which focuses on factoring but most of it applies just as well to discrete log). And we know that if we can ever get practical quantum computers working then DH will be breakable, but the overall impact of this work is absolutely undeniable.
Phone assistance started with Nixon, expanded by Reagan and again expanded by Obama. Both expansion where to keep up with the times and needs of the nation.
No one called them Nixonphones or Reaganphones.
It is simply a long-standing federal program.