Stephen Pohlig

Stephen Pohlig (deceased April 14, 2017) was an 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,[1] including the Pohlig–Hellman exponentiation cipher and the Pohlig–Hellman algorithm[2] 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.

In his spare time Stephen Pohlig was a keen kayaker known to many throughout the New England area.

Bibliography

gollark: They must have done *something* in 40 years.
gollark: Would it not make sense to at least keep it around somewhere to break it down for materials?
gollark: I see.
gollark: I may be missing something, but why are they just throwing away the interstellar drive in the first place?
gollark: So we have 32 minerals now, right? Build the mining rig.

References

  1. Savage, Neil (June 2016). "The Key to Privacy". Communications of the ACM. 59 (6). doi:10.1145/2911979. Retrieved 2016-07-14.
  2. Oral history interview with Martin Hellman, 2004, Palo Alto, California. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.


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