PWL #27: New Directions in Cryptography

The Main Event
David Murray presents New Directions in Cryptography (https://www.cs.upc.edu/~diaz/diffie.hellman.pdf) and A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems (http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Rsapaper.pdf).

These two classic papers are big favorites of mine. New Directions in Cryptography introduced the idea of digital signatures and public key cryptosystems, and reduced both problems to the search for a trap-door one-way permutation. Although Diffie and Hellman were unable to come up with such a permutation (settling for "just" Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange), they laid the theoretical framework and invited others to join the search. Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman read the paper, did a lot of hard thinking, and a year later published A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems - now known as the RSA algorithm.

David works on Infrastructure Security for Salesforce.com.

Who What Where
Big ups to WeWork (https://www.wework.com/) for providing the space and Salesforce (https://trust.salesforce.com/en/security/) for providing the victuals! Enter through the doors on the north corner of the building - they'll be locked by 6:30 (when food starts), but we'll have someone down there to let you in until 7:00 (when discussion of the paper starts).

And Please Remember

Like all chapters of Papers We Love, we abide by and enforce the PWL Code of Conduct (https://github.com/papers-we-love/seattle/blob/master/code-of-conduct.md). Please give it a read, plan on conducting yourself accordingly, and involve one of the organizers if you have any concerns.