- Person
- Martin Hellman
- Lived
- b. 1945
- Field
- Cryptography
- From
- American
The story
Martin Hellman was born in New York in 1945 to a Jewish family, the grandson of immigrants from Eastern Europe, and grew up in the Bronx, where as a child he faced prejudice as a Jew in a largely Catholic neighbourhood. He studied electrical engineering at New York University and Stanford, and in 1971 joined the Stanford faculty. Colleagues warned him that working on cryptography was foolish, since the National Security Agency had far more money and secret knowledge. He did it anyway.
The problem he wanted to solve was key distribution. For all of history, two people who wanted to communicate secretly had to share the same secret key beforehand, delivered by courier or agreed in person. That could never work for millions of strangers communicating over computer networks. Working with Whitfield Diffie, and building on ideas also explored by Ralph Merkle, Hellman found a way out.
Their paper New Directions in Cryptography, published in 1976 in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, proposed public-key cryptography, in which each user has a public key that can be shared openly and a private key kept secret. It also introduced digital signatures and described a method, now known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange, by which two people can agree on a secret key over a public channel without an eavesdropper learning it. Hellman has argued that the method should be called Diffie–Hellman–Merkle key exchange to credit Merkle’s contribution. The paper inspired the RSA system the next year and turned cryptography into an open academic science.
The 2015 Turing Award citation said that the paper introduced the ideas of public-key cryptography and digital signatures, which are the foundation for most regularly used security protocols on the internet today. Versions of Diffie–Hellman key exchange are used whenever a browser sets up a secure connection, and in secure messaging and virtual private networks. A Stanford profile notes that the technology is used to transfer trillions of dollars every day.
Why it matters
Public-key cryptography lets billions of people bank, shop and message privately online with websites and people they have never met.
About Martin Hellman
Bronx-born Stanford engineer who co-invented public-key cryptography with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle, the basis of secure web browsing, banking and messaging. Turing Award 2015.
Sources
- Martin Hellman Wikipedia
- Martin E. Hellman: An Oral History Stanford Historical Society, Stanford Digital Repository
- Leonard Adleman, RSA Cryptography National Inventors Hall of Fame
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.