The People Who Got Me Into Cybersecurity and Cryptography … Marty Hellman, Neal Koblitz and Bruce…

The People Who Got Me Into Cybersecurity and Cryptography … Marty Hellman, Neal Koblitz and Bruce Schneier

It’s not often you get to chat with the people who got you into what you do just now, but, over the past couple of weeks, I have been lucky enough to do that. So, who were they?

So, the first is Bruce Schneier, and he came along and chatted with our students two weeks ago [here]. I read one of Bruce’s books, and it hooked me on cybersecurity, and especially on the amazingness of public key cryptography. The read hook, though was reading about the Diffie Hellman method, and once I understood its operation, I was hooked on cryptography. And, then, it was elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) that has allowed me an almost endless amount of study. For this we were lucky to have Neal Koblitz — the creator of ECC— to come along and share his thoughts [here].

And so, one of the highlights in this academic year is for Marty Hellman (the creator of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange method). He came along on Friday for a chat:

Along with having an amazing research career, he has been a fantastic mentor to so many great people. But, at this core, is that he is a caring and compassionate person, who is so positive in bringing out the best in people. To move from cryptography into areas of national security shows why he is such a unique person.

If you don’t know how important the Diffie-Hellman method is in our online security, then perhaps you should. With this, we use discrete logs, and where Bob comes up with a secret value (b), and Alice creates her own secret value (a). They both agree to use a generator (g) and a large prime number (p). Bob computes B=g^b (mod p), and sends it to Alice, and Alice computes A=g^b (mod p) and sends it to Bob. Bob then takes Alice’s value and computes the shared secret of K=A^b (mod p). Alice should get the same value with K=B^a (mod p). The shared value is then K=g^{ab} (mod p). Isn’t that just magic?

These days we use elliptic curve methods (as created by Neal Koblitz) instead and define it as the Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman (ECDH) method.

The chat …

And, so, the human side of Marty always comes to the fore:

And, for the dreamers and the inventors, he likens it to a muse who whispers in your ear, but you dismiss its ideas as being crazy:

For many, the whole concept of public key encryption was just so crazy, that few could have seen it being realised. And, for the amazing Ralph Merkle (creator of the Merkle Tree that is used in blockchain applications):

And, in the time that Adi Shamir cracked the method that Ralph Merkle and Marty had created:

And his advice to those innovators that people point fingers at and say they are fools:

And, there you go, a Turing Prize winner (the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in Computer Science) reflecting on an amazing life.