New York, National Computer Conference. The audience of cryptography experts is astonished by the presentation of the Diffie-Hellman-Merkle exchange scheme, which enables two interlocutors (usually called Alice and Bob) to exchange a secret through public discussion. Whitfield Diffie (Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, a graduate of MIT, and one of the first cyberpunks), Martin Hellman, and Ralph Merkle patent the idea the following year. The “trick” lies in the use of the arithmetic operator Modulo in the form Y^x (mod(P)). However, the problem of key distribution remains, as in the Diffie-Hellman-Merkle scheme, Alice and Bob must both be online at the same time to establish the secret key. Diffie, Hellman, and Merkle also realized that the solution lay in an “asymmetric cipher.” They worked on it at Stanford University, but they couldn’t find a special asymmetric “one-way” function that would make the asymmetric cipher a usable reality. This challenge would be won by another trio, 5,000 kilometers away, on the other coast of the United States. They were Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, who would create RSA, an asymmetric encryption system. The contribution of Diffie, Hellman, and Merkle, and then Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman, was probably the greatest leap forward for cryptography in two thousand years.
