Spying Raises Academic Questions

Next week in London the (open) inventor of public key cryptography, Dr Whitfield Diffie, a “distinguished engineer” with Sun Microsystems, California, will be lecturing to the British Society for the History of Mathematics at University College, London. He will compare his own open invention of “public key cryptography” in 1976 with a recent claim that British government cryptographers discovered the same idea six years earlier.

Diffie and colleague Martin Hellman first published the idea in a landmark paper, “New directions in cryptography” in November 1976. Over the next two years, a second group of mathematicians – Rivest, Shamir and Adelman (RSA) - published the first practical technique for implementing public key cryptography.

Read the article HERE.