30 Years of Public Key Cryptography

An anonymous reader writes "Public key crypto turned 30 last night, and the biggest names in crypto turned out to celebrate at an event hosted at the Computer History Museum. Voltage Security teamed with RSA to bring together some of the most famous cryptographers of yesterday (Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman) and today (Dan Boneh), along with luminaries Ray Ozzie, Brian Snow, and Jim Bidzos. From the ZDNet article: 'NYT reporter John Markoff, who has covered Silicon Valley for 30 years, was master of ceremonies, and started off by saying that no technology has had a more profound impact than cryptography, and that public-key cryptography has been underappreciated for its role in the Internet. Without public key cryptography, ecommerce would be an idea as opposed to an enabler of billions of daily transactions.' You can view the podcast and pictures of the event at the Voltage Security site.."

No technology with a more profound impact?

[Anonymous Coward]

no technology has had a more profound impact than cryptography

I hear that the wheel had quite an impact. Oh yeah and the steam engine. Not fogetting the printing press. Or even plastic. Seriously, do they even think before parroting this nonsense?

No Zimmerman? Where was the real party?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

No Zimmerman? Where was the real party?

Re:Actually I'm SURE it is

[h2g2bob]

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA) says it was first invented by Clifford Cocks at good ol' GCHQ. I also read that somewhere in a book, so it's probably right.

Re:No technology with a more profound impact?

[jcmb]

If PKC isn't as important as you say it is, then why do we have a multibillion dollar agency (which hires the most brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists in the country) almost entirely devoted to cryptography? Plus, it's illegal for us to use certain key sizes because the NSA considers it to be a weapon!

PKC and other forms of cryptography are extremely important and vital to the success of NATIONS. Plus, imagine how hard it would be to communicate over the Internet without PKC, you'd have to syncronize keys with the second party all the time!

Thanks for (holding back) encryption, RSA!

[iansmith]

Without public key cryptography, ecommerce would be an idea as opposed to an enabler of billions of daily transactions.

And without the patent on public-key encryption that covered not just the method but the very idea of it, we might all have secured communications by now. But instead we are not much further ahead except for ssh which at least helps network admins.

I just have a hard time cheering for RSA which did nothing other than patent a mathematical formula discovered by multiple people and prevent it's dfree use in America and other countries that allow software patents.

I was using PGP back in the early 90's and was frustrated that it's use was hamstrung by the patent and US laws on exporting encryption software. What a waste.