Martin Hellman

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Martin Hellman
Martin-Hellman.jpg
Born
Martin Edward Hellman

(1945-10-02) October 2, 1945 (age 79)
New York City, United States
Nationality American
Alma mater New York University (BE, 1966)
Stanford University (MS, 1967; PhD, 1969)
Known for Diffie–Hellman key exchange
Awards IEEE Centennial Medal (1984)
EFF Pioneer Award (1994)
Louis E. Levy Medal (1997)
Golden Jubilee Awards for Technological Innovation (1998)
Marconi Prize (2000)
National Academy of Engineering Member (2002)
Hamming Medal (2010)
Computer History Museum Fellow (2011) [1]
Turing Award (2015)
Scientific career
Fields Cryptography
Computer science
Electrical engineering
Institutions Stanford University
MIT
IBM Research
Thesis Learning with Finite Memory  (1969)
Doctoral advisor Thomas Cover
Doctoral students Ralph Merkle
Taher Elgamal
Website ee.stanford.edu/~hellman

Martin Edward Hellman (born October 2, 1945) is an American cryptologist and mathematician, best known for his invention of public-key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle. [2] [3] Hellman is a longtime contributor to the computer privacy debate, and has applied risk analysis to a potential failure of nuclear deterrence.

Contents

Hellman was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2002 for contributions to the theory and practice of cryptography.

In 2016, he wrote a book with his wife, Dorothie Hellman, that links creating love at home to bringing peace to the planet (A New Map for Relationships: Creating True Love at Home and Peace on the Planet).

Early life

Born in New York to a Jewish family, [4] Hellman graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. He went on to take his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from New York University in 1966, and at Stanford University he received a master's degree and a Ph.D. in the discipline in 1967 and 1969. [5]

Career

From 1968 to 1969 he worked at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he encountered Horst Feistel. From 1969 to 1971, he was an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined Stanford University electrical engineering department in 1971 as an assistant professor and served on the full-time faculty for twenty-five years before taking emeritus status as a full professor in 1996. [6]

Public key cryptography

Hellman and Whitfield Diffie's paper New Directions in Cryptography was published in 1976. It introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, which went far toward solving one of the fundamental problems of cryptography, key distribution. [7] [8] It has become known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange, although Hellman has argued that it ought to be called Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange because of Merkle's separate contribution. The article stimulated the development of a new class of encryption algorithms, known variously as public key encryption and asymmetric encryption. Hellman and Diffie were awarded the Marconi Fellowship and accompanying prize in 2000 for work on public-key cryptography and for helping make cryptography a legitimate area of academic research, [9] and they were awarded the 2015 Turing Award for the same work. [7]

Computer privacy debate

Hellman has been a longtime contributor to the computer privacy debate. He and Diffie were the most prominent critics of the short key size of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) in 1975. An audio recording survives of their review of DES at Stanford in 1976 with Dennis Branstad of NBS and representatives of the National Security Agency. [10] Their concern was well-founded: subsequent history has shown not only that NSA actively intervened with IBM and NBS to shorten the key size, but also that the short key size enabled exactly the kind of massively parallel key crackers that Hellman and Diffie sketched out. In response to RSA Security's DES Challenges starting in 1997, brute force crackers were built that could break DES, making it clear that DES was insecure and obsolete. As of 2012, a $10,000 commercially available machine could recover a DES key in days.[ citation needed ]

Hellman also served (1994–96) on the National Research Council's Committee to Study National Cryptographic Policy, whose main recommendations have since been implemented.

International security

Hellman has been active in researching international security since 1985.

Beyond War

Hellman was involved in the original Beyond War movement, serving as the principal editor for the "BEYOND WAR: A New Way of Thinking" booklet. [11]

Breakthrough

In 1987 more than 30 scholars came together to produce Russian and English editions of the book Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking, Soviet and Western Scholars Issue a Challenge to Build a World Beyond War. Anatoly Gromyko and Martin Hellman served as the chief editors. The authors of the book examine questions such as: How can we overcome the inexorable forces leading toward a clash between the United States and the Soviet Union? How do we build a common vision for the future? How can we restructure our thinking to synchronize with the imperative of our modern world? [12] [13]

Defusing the nuclear threat

Hellman's current project in international security is to defuse the nuclear threat. In particular, he is studying the probabilities and risks associated with nuclear weapons and encouraging further international research in this area. His website NuclearRisk.org has been endorsed by a number of prominent individuals, including a former director of the National Security Agency, Stanford's President Emeritus, and two Nobel Laureates.

Hellman is a member of the Board of Directors for Daisy Alliance, a non-governmental organization based in Atlanta, Georgia, seeking global security through nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament.

Awards and honors

In 1980, Martin Hellman was elevated to the grade of IEEE fellow for contribution to cryptography. [14] In 1997 he was awarded The Franklin Institute's Louis E. Levy Medal, [15] in 1981 the IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award (together with Whitfield Diffie), [16] in 2000, he won the Marconi Prize for his invention of public-key cryptography to protect privacy on the Internet, also together with Whit Diffie. [17] In 1998, Hellman was a Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society, [18] and in 2010 the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal. [19]

In 2011, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. [20]

Also in 2011, Hellman was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum for his work, with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle, on public key cryptography. [21]

Hellman won the Turing Award for 2015 together with Whitfield Diffie. The Turing award is widely considered the most prestigious award in the field of computer science. The citation for the award was: "For fundamental contributions to modern cryptography. Diffie and Hellman's groundbreaking 1976 paper, "New Directions in Cryptography," introduced the ideas of public-key cryptography and digital signatures, which are the foundation for most regularly-used security protocols on the internet today." [7]

Related Research Articles

In cryptography, key size or key length refers to the number of bits in a key used by a cryptographic algorithm.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diffie–Hellman key exchange</span> Method of exchanging cryptographic keys

Diffie–Hellman (DH) key exchange is a mathematical method of securely generating a symmetric cryptographic key over a public channel and was one of the first public-key protocols as conceived by Ralph Merkle and named after Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. DH is one of the earliest practical examples of public key exchange implemented within the field of cryptography. Published in 1976 by Diffie and Hellman, this is the earliest publicly known work that proposed the idea of a private key and a corresponding public key.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Public-key cryptography</span> Cryptographic system with public and private keys

Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is the field of cryptographic systems that use pairs of related keys. Each key pair consists of a public key and a corresponding private key. Key pairs are generated with cryptographic algorithms based on mathematical problems termed one-way functions. Security of public-key cryptography depends on keeping the private key secret; the public key can be openly distributed without compromising security. There are many kinds of public-key cryptosystems, with different security goals, including digital signature, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, public-key key encapsulation, and public-key encryption.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ralph Merkle</span> American cryptographer (born 1952)

Ralph C. Merkle is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is one of the inventors of public-key cryptography, the inventor of cryptographic hashing, and more recently a researcher and speaker on cryonics.

A key in cryptography is a piece of information, usually a string of numbers or letters that are stored in a file, which, when processed through a cryptographic algorithm, can encode or decode cryptographic data. Based on the used method, the key can be different sizes and varieties, but in all cases, the strength of the encryption relies on the security of the key being maintained. A key's security strength is dependent on its algorithm, the size of the key, the generation of the key, and the process of key exchange.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adi Shamir</span> Israeli cryptographer (born 1952)

Adi Shamir is an Israeli cryptographer and inventor. He is a co-inventor of the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm, a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme, one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer science.

The Merkle–Hellman knapsack cryptosystem was one of the earliest public key cryptosystems. It was published by Ralph Merkle and Martin Hellman in 1978. A polynomial time attack was published by Adi Shamir in 1984. As a result, the cryptosystem is now considered insecure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ron Rivest</span> American cryptographer

Ronald Linn Rivest is an American cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Cryptomathic is a software company specializing in the area of cryptography for e-commerce security systems. The company develops secure software for the financial and governmental industries. It focuses especially on developing back-end solutions using hardware security modules.

Articles related to cryptography include:

The Clipper chip was a chipset that was developed and promoted by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) as an encryption device that secured "voice and data messages" with a built-in backdoor that was intended to "allow Federal, State, and local law enforcement officials the ability to decode intercepted voice and data transmissions." It was intended to be adopted by telecommunications companies for voice transmission. Introduced in 1993, it was entirely defunct by 1996.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Whitfield Diffie</span> American cryptographer (born 1944)

Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie ForMemRS is an American cryptographer and mathematician and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, that helped solve key distribution—a fundamental problem in cryptography. Their technique became known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The article stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Key exchange</span> Cryptographic method

Key exchange is a method in cryptography by which cryptographic keys are exchanged between two parties, allowing use of a cryptographic algorithm.

Paul Carl Kocher is an American cryptographer and cryptography entrepreneur who founded Cryptography Research, Inc. (CRI) and served as its president and chief scientist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">EFF DES cracker</span> Cryptographic hardware

In cryptography, the EFF DES cracker is a machine built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1998, to perform a brute force search of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher's key space – that is, to decrypt an encrypted message by trying every possible key. The aim in doing this was to prove that the key size of DES was not sufficient to be secure.

The Diffie–Hellman problem (DHP) is a mathematical problem first proposed by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in the context of cryptography and serves as the theoretical basis of the Diffie–Hellman key exchange and its derivatives. The motivation for this problem is that many security systems use one-way functions: mathematical operations that are fast to compute, but hard to reverse. For example, they enable encrypting a message, but reversing the encryption is difficult. If solving the DHP were easy, these systems would be easily broken.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cryptography</span> Practice and study of secure communication techniques

Cryptography, or cryptology, is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages. Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, information security, electrical engineering, digital signal processing, physics, and others. Core concepts related to information security are also central to cryptography. Practical applications of cryptography include electronic commerce, chip-based payment cards, digital currencies, computer passwords, and military communications.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to cryptography:

Stephen C. Pohlig was an American electrical engineer who worked in the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. As a graduate student of Martin Hellman's at Stanford University in the mid-1970s, he helped develop the underlying concepts of Diffie-Hellman key exchange, including the Pohlig–Hellman exponentiation cipher and the Pohlig–Hellman algorithm for computing discrete logarithms. That cipher can be regarded as a predecessor to the RSA (cryptosystem) since all that is needed to transform it into RSA is to change the arithmetic from modulo a prime number to modulo a composite number.

References

  1. ↑ Martin Hellman 2011 Fellow Archived 2013-05-09 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ↑ "Martin E. Hellman, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering". Stanford . Retrieved 2016-03-05.
  3. ↑ "Martin E. Hellman". DBLP . Retrieved 2016-11-04.
  4. ↑ Universities should restore spiritual side, says Professor Martin Hellman, NEWS RELEASE, 11/28/95
  5. ↑ Hellman, Martin (1969). Learning with Finite Memory (PhD thesis). Stanford University. ProQuest   302464730.
  6. ↑ Martin Hellman's webpage at Stanford University http://www-ee.stanford.edu/~hellman
  7. 1 2 3 "Cryptography Pioneers Receive 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award". ACM.
  8. ↑ Diffie, Whitfield; Hellman, Martin (1976-11-01). "New directions in cryptography" (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 22 (6): 644–654. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.37.9720 . doi:10.1109/TIT.1976.1055638. ISSN   0018-9448.
  9. ↑ Columbia University press release regarding Marconi Fellowship
  10. ↑ "DES (Data Encryption Standard) Review at Stanford University". 1976. Archived from the original on 2012-05-03. Retrieved 2012-03-20.
  11. ↑ Richard Rathbun, Rick Roney, Louise Smith, Donna Richeson, Don Fitton, Craig Ritchey, "BEYOND WAR: A New Way of Thinking", (Editors: Martin Hellman, Craig Barnes, Al Braun, Pat Chandler, Jack Li, Mac Lawrence, Tom Lindsay, Tom Osborne, Chris Rich, Nancy Ritchey, Karen Stevens and Judie Swope.) PDF available free online
  12. ↑ Breakthrough website page
  13. ↑ Anatoly Gromyko, Martin Hellman, Craig Barnes, Alexander Nikitin, Donald Fitton, Sergei Kapitza, Elena Loshchenkova, William McGlashan, Andrei Melville, Harold Sandler, Olivia Simantob, "Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking", Walker and Company, ISBN   0-8027-1026-3, ISBN   0-8027-1015-8 and published simultaneously in the Soviet Union by Progress Publishing Company, Moscow. Martin Hellman's Stanford website page, PDF online free
  14. ↑ "IEEE Fellows 1980 | IEEE Communications Society".
  15. ↑ "Franklin Laureate Database – Louis E. Levy Medal Laureates". Franklin Institute. Archived from the original on June 29, 2011. Retrieved January 22, 2011.
  16. ↑ "IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award Recipients" (PDF). IEEE. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 24, 2010. Retrieved January 2, 2011.
  17. ↑ "Martin E. Hellman – Awarded the Marconi Prize in 2000". Marconi Society. 26 October 2000.
  18. ↑ "Golden Jubilee Awards for Technological Innovation". IEEE Information Theory Society . Retrieved July 14, 2011.
  19. ↑ "IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal Recipients" (PDF). IEEE. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 20, 2010. Retrieved January 22, 2011.
  20. ↑ "Meet the 2011 National Inventors Hall of Fame Inductees – Martin Hellman". National Inventors Hall of Fame. Archived from the original on September 4, 2012. Retrieved May 5, 2011.
  21. ↑ "Martin Hellman". Computer History Museum. Archived from the original on 2013-05-09. Retrieved 2013-05-23.
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