One of the Greatest Computer Science Conferences Ever? Crypto 85
The amazing Victor S Miller sent a photo of the Crypto 85 conference. It featured authors such as Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, Tahir ElGamal, Whitfield Diffie, Shafi Goldwasser, Don Coppersmith, Oded Goldreich, David Chaum, and Moti Yung. It ran from 12 August to 22 August 1985:
Here we see some of the papers, and which includes Len Adleman, David Chaum, Adi Shamir, Don Coppersmith, Whitfield Diffie, Moti Yang, G.R. Blakey, and Ron Rivest:
In fact, it was often in the “Rump” Sessions that the real excitement happened. Here is the moment that Len Adleman and Adi Shamir broke the Merkle-Hellman Knapsack public key method [here]:
Last week, I chatted with Victor S Miller [here], and he sent me this photo:
How many of the greats can you recognise in this photo?
But there was one paper which would be a slow-burner, but eventually, build the foundation for security on the Internet [1]:
Thank elliptic curve cryptography for securing the key exchange in this Web connection, and, for the usage of ECDSA in Bitcoin and Ethereum, and so many other things. As we see, his papers received very few citations initally — and where he only received 37 citations in 1991:
For the paper itself, it only received 26 citations in 1996, but this grew to over 350 in 2011:
One of the key reasons for this was that in 2001, Johnson et al published the ECDSA signature method, and which was a considerable improvement over the DSA signature method. In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto selected the secp256k1 curve for Bitcoin, and then which was soon adopted for Ethereum.
You can listen to Victor S Miller here:
References
[1] Miller, V. S. (1985, August). Use of elliptic curves in cryptography. In Conference on the theory and application of cryptographic techniques (pp. 417–426). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
[2] Johnson, D., Menezes, A., & Vanstone, S. (2001). The elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA). International journal of information security, 1(1), 36–63.
