RSA founders give perspective on cryptography

The famous cryptographers Leonard Adleman, Ronald Rivest, and Adi Shamir - the developers of the RSA encryption code - received the Association for Computing Machinery's 2002 Turing Award "for their seminal contributions to the theory and practical application of public-key cryptography." Their Turing Award lectures, given last June, are available online. Rivest, Shamir and Adleman implemented public-key cryptography in the 1970s following the landmark work of Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. They then founded RSA Security, which became one of the most respected security companies in the world.

RSA organizes the immensely valuable annual RSA Conferences, perhaps the most significant security conference of the year now that the National Computer Security Center and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have stopped their late lamented National Computer Security Conferences.

While I'm mentioning RSA, I should remind readers that its FAQ is an excellent source of information about cryptography.

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