Wikinventia — Atlas of discoveries and inventions · Global Age

Diffie-Hellman key exchange — Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman

1976 AD · Transmission: Global
MathematicsMethodNorth American

Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, researchers at Stanford University, publish in November 1976 "New Directions in Cryptography" in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, introducing the concept of public-key cryptography into the open scientific literature and the discrete-logarithm key-exchange protocol. The article is the most cited in the history of cryptography. Its open publication launches the field of public-key cryptography in academia and industry. Diffie and Hellman did not know of the classified GCHQ work — Cocks (1973), Ellis (1970), Williamson (1974) — which had solved the same problems three years earlier in secret. They received the Turing Award in 2015.

InstitutionStanford University — Electrical Engineering Department
Historical regionUnited States (California)
Primary sourceDiffie, W. & Hellman, M.E. — "New Directions in Cryptography" (IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 22:6, November 1976, pp. 644–654). DOI: 10.1109/TIT.1976.1055638
Secondary sourceSingh, S. — The Code Book (Fourth Estate, 1999), ch. 6; Levy, S. — Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government (Viking, 2001)
Original languageEnglish
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