- History Continued...
- 1976: FIPS PUB-46; a design by IBM, based on the Lucifer
cipher and with changes (including both S-box improvements and
reduction of key size) by the US NSA, was chosen to be the U.S.
Data Encryption Standard. It has since found worldwide
acceptance, largely because it has shown itself strong against
20 years of attacks. Even some who believe it is past its
useful life use it as a component -- e.g., of 3-key
triple-DES.
- April 1977: Inspired by the Diffie-Hellman paper and acting
as complete novices in cryptography, Ronald L. Rivest, Adi
Shamir and Leonard M. Adleman had been discussing how to make a
practical public key system. One night in April, Ron Rivest was
laid up with a massive headache and the RSA algorithm came to
him. He wrote it up for Shamir and Adleman and sent it to them
the next morning. It was a practical public-key cipher for both
confidentiality and digital signatures, based on the difficulty
of factoring large numbers. They submitted this to Martin
Gardner on April 4 for publication in Scientific American. It
appeared in the September, 1977 issue. The Scientific American
article included an offer to send the full technical report to
anyone submitting a self-addressed, stamped envelope. There
were thousands of such requests, from all over the world.
- 1978: the RSA algorithm was published in the Communications of the ACM.
- 1991: Phil Zimmerman released his first version of PGP
(Pretty Good Privacy) in response to the threat by the FBI to
demand access to the cleartext of the communications of
citizens. Although PGP offered little beyond what was already
available in products like Mailsafe from RSADSI, PGP is notable
because it was released as freeware and has become a worldwide
standard as a result.
Copyright 1997 by Slackers Union. Comments should go to any of the
group members. Opinions reflected on this page are by no means
opinions
of UCSD. Go sue somebody else.
Last Modified: June 1, 1997
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