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
- S. Pohlig and M. Hellman, "An improved algorithm for computing logarithms over GF(p) and its cryptographic significance (Corresp.)," Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on 24, no. 1 (1978): 106-110.
- Martin E. Hellman and Stephen C. Pohlig, "United States Patent: 4424414 - Exponentiation cryptographic apparatus and method," January 3, 1984.
- Boston Globe Obituary, "http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?n=stephen-c-pohlig&pid=185155411&fhid=20778"
References
- ^ Savage, Neil (June 2016). "The Key to Privacy". Communications of the ACM. 59 (6). doi:10.1145/2911979. Retrieved 2016-07-14.
- ^ Oral history interview with Martin Hellman, 2004, Palo Alto, California. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
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