After 48 Years, It’s A Long Goodbye to the Diffie-Hellman Method

This week, in my lecture, I will outline one of the most amazing methods ever created in computer science: the Diffie-Hellman method. It was first outlined by Whitfield Diffie and Marty Hellman in 1976 in a paper that built the foundation of our modern world of cybersecurity:

And so, after nearly five decades (48 years, to be precise), the Diffie-Hellman method has done so well in protecting citizen data, and is used in virtually every connection we make to the Internet. For this, Bob and Alice can create session key pairs, and then pass their public key values, and then end up with the same shared key:

The original paper was based on discrete logarithms, and where Bob and Alice agree on a base generator (g) and a…