Browsing by Subject "Public key cryptography."

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    Oral history interview with James Bidzos
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 2004-12-11) Bidzos, James
    James Bidzos begins by discussing his early career at IBM and as an international businessman in IT. He then moves on to describe how he came to take the helm of struggling software security firm RSA Data Security. He relates a number of early business challenges in financing and technology at this firm as it sought to commercialize encryption technology that extended from the research of MIT’s Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman—work that in turn built upon the invention of public key cryptography by Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie, and Ralph Merkle at Stanford University. In discussing how RSA developed into the leading software security firm, Bidzos describes the challenges posed by the government’s attempts to control the dissemination of encryption technology through export laws and other means. An important forum for debate on such issues (and later issues like the Clipper Chip) was the annual RSA Conference, a meeting that Bidzos initiated that included individuals from industry, government, and computer scientists, and evolved to become the leading annual event in the computer/software security field. Finally, Bidzos discusses the commercialization of encryption for authentication (signatures) by partnering with other major firms to found VeriSign.
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    Oral history interview with Martin Hellman
    (Charles Babbage Institute, 2004-11-22) Hellman, Martin
    Leading cryptography scholar Martin Hellman begins by discussing his developing interest in cryptography, factors underlying his decision to do academic research in this area, and the circumstances and fundamental insights of his invention of public key cryptography with collaborators Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle at Stanford University in the mid-1970s. He also relates his subsequent work in cryptography with Steve Pohlig (the Pohlig-Hellman system) and others. Hellman addresses his involvement with and the broader context of the debate about the federal government’s cryptography policy—regarding to the National Security Agency’s (NSA) early efforts to contain and discourage academic work in the field, the Department of Commerce’s encryption export restrictions (under the International Traffic of Arms Regulation, or ITAR), and key escrow (the so-called Clipper chip). He also touches on the commercialization of cryptography with RSA Data Security and VeriSign, as well as indicates some important individuals in academe and industry who have not received proper credit for their accomplishments in the field of cryptography.