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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.
Crypto Gurus Diffie, Hellman Win 2015 Turing Award
What is the big problem with using the word "and" in a headline? It's the internet. You're not paying per byte and you don't have a fixed width to squeeze your headline into.
Throw off the shackles of your printed media forebears!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I really can't think of more deserving recipients. I've never met Hellman, but I've met Diffie a few times, including when we testified to the Senate Commerce Committee during the 1990s Crypto Wars. He's a national asset whenever the NSA and FBI get a little too far out of line. Which is most of the time.
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.
Where you see eccentricity, I see genius, insight and long hair. And I couldn't care less about the long hair.
I don't like locked-down computers any more than you do. I hate ransomware even more; it's the single most despicable use of public key cryptography there is. But consider that without public key cryptography Apple wouldn't even be in a position to stop the FBI from hacking the iPhone. Individuals wouldn't even have the option to secure their personal communications, at least not in practice. (Yes, I know all about one-time pads. That's why I said "in practice"). Nor would we have the Internet, or at least anything like the one we have now. And without the Internet, computers of all kinds (secure or non-secure boot) wouldn't be nearly as capable and available as they are now because the volume and demand would be vastly less.
Diffie testified in the NewEgg patent troll case and was grilled pretty hard by the attorney, specifically about the work and role of Ellis/GCHQ. He has never tried to deny them credit for their work, but in most practical senses, they didn't invent it.
"Dr. Diffie, you were not the first to invent public key cryptography, were you?"
"I believe that I may have been," said Diffie, speaking cautiously. "But perhaps you could be more specific?"
"In fact, a gentleman named James Ellis in England invented it before you, right?"
Diffie sighed. He seemed, suddenly, almost tired. He had heard this one before. "I spent a lot of time talking to James Ellis, and I can't figure it out," he said. "James Ellis did very fine work."
[...]
"So, in fact, according to the IEEE, someone else invented public key cryptography before you, correct?"
"I disagree," said Diffie. "Ellis' paper is in no sense enabling. [His partner] Malcolm Williamson's paper enables Diffie-Hellman, and it was an internal secret note written two months after I presented that at the largest computer conference in the world."
[...]
"The alleged prior inventors not only kept it secret but did very little with it," said Diffie. "In James Ellis' words to me: 'You did a lot more with it than we did.'"
[...]
"The short answer would be that James Ellis' work in 1969 and 1970 certainly does not teach the methods. Personally, I find that paper incomprehensible. I'm not clear how anybody became convinced of anything from it."
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Not to diminsh in any way the excellent work of Diffie and Hellmann - but it seems to me (and to at least Hellman) that Merkle (still) doesn't get as much credit as he deserves.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way