The People Who Got Me Into Cybersecurity and Cryptography … Marty Hellman, Neal Koblitz and Bruce Schneier

It’s not often you get to chat with the people who got you into what you do just now, but, over the past couple of weeks, I have been lucky enough to do that. So, who were they?

So, the first is Bruce Schneier, and he came along and chatted with our students two weeks ago [here]. I read one of Bruce’s books, and it hooked me on cybersecurity, and especially on the amazingness of public key cryptography. The read hook, though was reading about the Diffie Hellman method, and once I understood its operation, I was hooked on cryptography. And, then, it was elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) that has allowed me an almost endless amount of study. For this we were lucky to have Neal Koblitz — the creator of ECC— to come along and share his thoughts [here].

And so, one of the highlights in this academic year is for Marty Hellman (the creator of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange method). He came along on Friday for a chat: