Builder of the Foundations of Cybersecurity: Ralph C Merkle

I’ve been lucky to speak to some of the great people who built the foundations for the security of the Internet, and yesterday I spoke with one of the greats: Ralph C Merkle:

Ralph is a co-inventor of public-key cryptography, the inventor of cryptographic hashing, created Merkle’s Puzzles, the co-inventor of the Merkle–Hellman knapsack cryptosystem, and invented Merkle trees. He received his B.S. in computer science in 1974 from UC Berkeley and a PhD. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1979. More recently, he is a researcher and speaker on cryonics. Ralph was a research scientist at the famous Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), and a nanotechnology theorist at Zyvex.

Ralph has also been a Distinguished Professor at Georgia Tech, a senior research fellow at IMM, a faculty member at Singularity University, and a board member at Alcor Life Extension Foundation. In 1998, he was a co-recipient of the Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology for Theory. In 2010, he received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for the invention of public key…