Diffie and Hellman Win Turing Award
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/newegg-trial-cryp...
"Yes, I am," said Diffie, in what surely qualified as the biggest understatement of the trial.
"And how is it that you're familiar with public key encryption?"
"I invented it."
Then Fenster dropped this bombshell: "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."
Why the "supposedly"?
Jul 16, 2015
"Two weeks after online retailer Newegg filed a petition complaining about "excessive and unreasonable" delays in getting a final judgment in its patent case, the judge in that case has handed Newegg a big win."
But I guess I missed the followup-followup and they won in the end, that's awesome!
[1] http://reason.com/archives/2013/03/12/the-second-great-crypt...
My reference is to when encryption was considered munitions and a bunch of people printed, shipped and scanned source code to get around the rules.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTGqP0nxX08
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BJuuUxCaaY
Merkle had a huge influence also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Merkle
http://www.merkle.com/1974/RejectionLetter.pdf
"I had failed to provide any references to the prior work on public key cryptography, and the reasons previous workers in the field had rejected it as impossible. I should have looked up "public key cryptography" on Google before submitting my paper. My defense is feeble: there was no Google, the term "public key cryptography" did not yet exist, and there were no previous workers in the field. There were no words for what I had done, and looking up a concept to show that no one had previously thought of it is difficult. This is not a unique problem: it illustrates a problem faced by anyone trying to explain a new idea to an "expert" who expects a properly referenced article anytime anyone tries to explain something to them. The more a new idea is unrelated to any prior idea or concept the more it must appear as a squawling bastard, naked and alone, appearing de novo and lacking any respectable pedigree or family to vouch for its acceptability."
When Lamport got his in 2013 I took the time to read "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" [1]. Been sleeping under the rock since then.
[1] https://www-ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/publications/24.pdf
It also occurred to me that Moxie Marlinspike was in the unusual position of being the only one on the panel of five not to have (yet!) received a Turing Award. (He came off very well nonetheless.)
(In addition to Diffie and Hellman, the other two Turing-awarded panelists were Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir.)
In any case, I didn't mean to imply that Moxie should receive a Turing Award. I just thought it was remarkable that 80% of the panel was Turing Award winners -- but only officially as of the beginning of the panel!
Most people with PhDs are probably pretty smart. But most smart people don't have PhDs.
As it happens I have probably created more outside of doing my PhD than in it; and whenever I was advising people on whether to do a PhD or not, would strongly suggest that they didn't. (The ones that ignored that advice and pressed on were exactly the type of people who could keep up the slog of doing it.)
Lots of people don't make it to the end and the going gets really tough towards the end, particularly when you are writing up and especially problematic if you have a young family. There's only so much time you can burn the candle at both ends.
So don't worry about not having a PhD; in fact, I'd argue that some of my undergraduate friends went on to much bigger and better things than I primarily because they got into the industry much earlier and therefore worked their way up.
Plus creating a startup now is so much easier than it used to be - if you see a business need that's not being satisfied, go for it. Most startups success is entirely down to chance and not educational background in any case.
https://nuclearrisk.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/the-turing-awar...
Merkle has an article on his website about the history of his public-key cryptography work[2].
This is by Simon Singh, who wrote the excellent book "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography", including a chapter on Diffie–Hellman–Merkle key exchange.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwNv0b-2AcU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-xEiOvXux4
"...I'm allowed to think about things outside work, but not allowed to put anything down on paper"
Marty and Whit deserve kudos for their important work in cryptography.
Some of the Q&A is pretty weird
- Knuth got his for TAOCP in 1976, 8 years after first publication.
- Thompson and Ritchie got theirs for UNIX in 1983, 10 or so years after its introduction.
- Englebart got his for his HCI work in 1997, 30 or so years after the fundamental work was done (but just after its universal adoption)
- Alan Kay got his for OOP & Smalltalk in 2003, 20+ years after the first stable release.
- Cert & Kahn got theirs for TCP/IP in 2005, 20+ years on.
And so forth.
The committees in the humanities seem much less concerned about this, and are able to award much sooner.
((g^a) mod p)^b mod p = (g^ab) mod p = ((g^b) mod p)^a mod p
-- The beauty of math.
Why it takes such long time for Computer Scientist to achieve such Award. DH Algo has been well known for long time. On the other hand Physicists(Theoretical, Astro, ...) dont have to wait too long to gain such recognition.
:)