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mabbo

"We've heard a good bit in this courtroom about public key encryption," said Albright. "Are you familiar with that?"

"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."

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Here's another interesting bit:

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."

I don't get it. Care to explain?

Public-key encryption was supposedly invented at GCHQ by James Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm Williamson in 1975, one year before Diffie and Hellman published their paper. The work had to be kept secret though, so they never published it.

This is just like the thing between Newton and Leibniz on who invented calculus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz–Newton_calculus_contro...

As far as I'm concerned, that's the price one pays for doing research in secret.

That's a pretty biting take on the matter. Who first taught you to hate your country?

"Hate my country?" What kind of nonsense is that?

What's the "I can't figure it out" part mean?

1973.

Why the "supposedly"?

My guess is that if it was not published at the time of discovery, there's no way to know for sure whether Ellis actually invented it before Diffie and Hellman.

The irony is that such a scheme for publicly disclosing proof you have a piece of data without immediately publishing the data requires public key cryptography and digital signatures to be public knowledge. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

Ellis conceived of practical public-key crypto PRIOR to Diffie but it was classified at GCHQ. Diffie wanted to know how Ellis invented it after he had heard this was the case.

Ellis was working at GCHQ and couldn't openly talk about his work.

stephen levy's book 'crypto' is pretty nice which can give you a sort of 'fly-on-the-wall' view of the whole thing :)

So the public key encryption equivalent of referring to TBL as "Web Developer" :)

epic :-)

Yeah, that was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this title :)

Holy damn that must have felt good haha.

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