Public Key Cryptography

Dignitaries from the computer security field took the stage at the Computer History Museum this evening to note the 30th anniversary of public key cryptography and wax historical about academic, governmental, and commercial developments in security, and ponder the future.

Panelists included Whitfield Diffie, who is a cryptography pioneer and chief security officer at Sun Microsystems, Martin Hellman, a Stanford University professor, Notes founder Ray Ozzie, now Microsoft's chief software architect, and Brian Snow, retired director for the National Security Agency's Information Assurance Directorate.

Public key cryptography uses public and private keys between sender and recipient of a message for security purposes. The sender encrypts a message with a public key and the recipient uses a private key to decrypt it. Its birth is traced to the November 1976 publishing of a paper entitled, "New Directions in Cryptography," by Diffie and Hellman.

Panelist Dan Boneh, also a Stanford University professor as well as a co-inventor of identity-based encryption, said government has gone from stalling deployment of cryptography to mandating it with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. "There's been a complete flip, recognizing that encryption is there to help us, not just to help our enemies," Boneh said.