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posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 24 2017, @11:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the those-who-ignore-history dept.

Two graduate students stood silently beside a lectern, listening as their professor presented their work to a conference.

Usually, the students would want the glory. And they had, just a couple of days previously. But their families talked them out of it.

A few weeks earlier, the Stanford researchers had received an unsettling letter from a shadowy US government agency. If they publicly discussed their findings, the letter said, it would be deemed legally equivalent to exporting nuclear arms to a hostile foreign power.

Stanford's lawyer said he thought they could defend any case by citing the First Amendment's protection of free speech. But the university could cover legal costs only for professors. So the students were persuaded to keep schtum.

What was this information that US spooks considered so dangerous? Were the students proposing to read out the genetic code of smallpox or lift the lid on some shocking presidential conspiracy?

No: they were planning to give the International Symposium on Information Theory an update on their work on public key cryptography.

[...] The Stanford researchers wondered whether encryption could be asymmetrical. Could you send an encrypted message to a stranger you'd never met before which only they could decode?

Before 1976 most experts would have said it was impossible. Then Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman published a breakthrough paper. It was Hellman who, a year later, would defy the threat of prosecution by presenting his students' work.

That same year, three researchers at MIT - Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman - turned the Diffie-Hellman theory into a practical technique, called RSA encryption, after their surnames.

Our tax dollars at work.

[Ed Note: This is from the BBC's 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy series and and is discussing a historical event. - fnord]


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @12:28AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @12:28AM (#499101)

    The content listed on the front page for this article does not mention when this was.

    While I like the engaging writing style, its not what I'm looking for here. I'm very interested in new cases about cryptography, but having to click though to this page and read to the end to determine this was not comparing some modern case to that famous one, but is about the historical even is a bit annoying.

    Please put enough information to determine if I should read the article in the title, or at least in the part of the summery listed on the main page. My default assumption on this site is articles are news (its a news site!), so when its unclear its not news, I assume news and then get annoyed when its not.

    Starting Score:    0  points
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    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @02:31AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @02:31AM (#499129)

    I think there are still part-time editor jobs available at SN. I'm sure you can help improve the site enough that it will be to your liking.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @03:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 25 2017, @03:43AM (#499140)

    Mod up. Regurgitating Diffie-Hellman paper as if it's a breaking news. WTF.

  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday April 25 2017, @07:09AM

    by driverless (4770) on Tuesday April 25 2017, @07:09AM (#499173)

    It's also pretty melodramatic, "exporting nuclear arms to a hostile foreign power", what a load of nonsense. Firstly you can't export nuclear arms, at least not commercially (you can if you're the military and you're deploying them). Secondly, ITAR could just as easily have been described as "posting an infrared sensor to Australia without a permit", which was another one of the many, many, often completely arbitrary, things covered. The whole thing seems to be pure clickbait created by someone who doesn't understand the issues but wants to get a ton of clicks for their web site.