- Person
- Leonard Adleman
- Lived
- b. 1945
- Field
- Computer science
- From
- American
The story
Leonard Adleman was born in California in 1945 into a Jewish family whose roots lay near Minsk, in present-day Belarus. He grew up in San Francisco, studied mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned his doctorate there in 1976 before joining the mathematics department of MIT.
That year Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman at Stanford proposed public-key cryptography, in which anyone could lock a message with a key published openly, but only the holder of a matching private key could unlock it. They had not found a complete practical system. Adleman’s MIT colleague Ron Rivest, joined by Adi Shamir, set out to build one, and Adleman became their adversary. According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, as Rivest and Shamir worked to develop an unbreakable system, Adleman tried to break each one, succeeding 42 times before the trio achieved success.
The scheme that survived, introduced in 1977 and named RSA from their initials, relies on the fact that multiplying two large prime numbers is easy, while recovering the primes from their product is extremely hard. The product can be published as part of the public key, while the primes stay secret. RSA could also create digital signatures, letting the sender of a message prove who wrote it. MIT received U.S. Patent No. 4,405,829 on the invention.
The National Inventors Hall of Fame calls RSA the world’s most widely used public-key cryptography method for securing communication on the internet, and says it was instrumental to the growth of e-commerce, used in almost all internet-based transactions to safeguard data such as credit card numbers. Adleman, Rivest and Shamir shared the 2002 Turing Award, and Adleman was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2018.
Before RSA, two parties had to share a secret key in advance to communicate privately. With RSA, a shop or bank can publish its public key to the whole world, and any customer can use it to send information that only the shop or bank can read.
Why it matters
RSA, tested and hardened by Adleman’s attacks, helps protect online payments, secure websites and software updates for billions of people.
About Leonard Adleman
San Francisco-born computer scientist, the A in RSA, the encryption that protects online payments and secure websites, and the founder of DNA computing. Turing Award 2002.
Sources
- Leonard Adleman National Inventors Hall of Fame
- Leonard Adleman Wikipedia
- Leonard Adleman: The Father of DNA Computing Stanford University
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.