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“MIT Unlocks Cryptography for the Masses” How MIT People Played a Major Role in the Early Development of Public Key Cryptography

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“MIT Unlocks Cryptography for the Masses” How MIT People Played a Major Role in the Early Development of Public Key Cryptography “MIT Unlocks Cryptography for the Masses” How MIT people played a major role in the early development of public key cryptography. by Ed Radlo ‘67 May 30, 2020 1 Why is PKC important? It’s what made it possible to conduct confidential (encrypted) communications over open (unsecure) networks, most notably the Internet. • enabled e-commerce • enabled confidential (encrypted) e-mails over unsecure networks PKC is a two-sided coin: encryption and authentication. • Running the algorithm in forward gives encryption. • Running the algorithm in reverse gives authentication. Authentication, implemented by digital signatures, gives three things: 1. mathematical proof that the message hasn’t been altered 2. mathematical proof that the nominal sender was the actual sender 3. the sender can’t repudiate that s/he sent the message 2 History of Encryption Has been around for thousands of years. • Used by Egyptians and Phoenicians in 2000 B.C. • Mostly military applications. • Same key used for encryption and decryption (symmetric cryptography). • PKC is asymmetric cryptography. In the 1970’s, computers became increasingly widespread. • DES was the first widely used commercial encryption algorithm developed by IBM symmetric NBS (now NIST) made it a government standard in 1977 NSA made it intentionally weak o government had a monopoly until 1970’s o fear that encryption would get in the wrong hands 3 The Public Key Revolution PKC per se invented by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in 1976. • Whit Diffie – MIT ‘65 • Marty Hellman – assistant professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT (1969 – 1971) Three parts to the invention: 1. key broken into two – public portion and private portion computationally infeasible to derive the private key from the public key Rivest and Hellman also credit Ralph Merkle with this part 2. key exchange over open networks 3. digital signatures “New Directions in Cryptography” (IEEE 1976) • no practical implementation • NSA tried to suppress publication under ITAR (national security) • Pushback led by Niels Reimers of Stanford (academic freedom) founded Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, and UCSF Offices of Technology Licensing (OTL) was loaned to MIT to “reform” the MIT OTL 4 Diffie and Hellman June 2016 edition of Communications of the ACM also on cover 5 Diffie and Hellman’s Seminal Paper 6 Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman Three MIT Ph.D’s who invented RSA algorithm in 1977. • Ron Rivest is now an MIT Institute Professor First successful implementation of PKC. Based upon difficulty in factoring the product of two large prime numbers. RSA algorithm became very popular and successful over time. • Software implementing RSA algorithm is the most widely used software in history. • R, S, & A assigned their invention to MIT, which patented it as U.S. 4,405,829 (issued 1983) • Patent was written and prosecuted by patent attorney Mark Lappin – MIT ’64 7 S, R, and A in 1978 at MIT 8 VectorStock® VectorStock.com/1687101 The RSA patent patent The RSA 9 Much PKC Patent Litigation in the 1990’s The validity of the RSA patent was at issue in federal district court litigation between 1994 and 1996. Public Key Partners (PKP) joint venture: • Cylink Corp. (hardware) • RSA Data Security, Inc. (software) started by R, S, and A in 1983 MIT was third party intervenor in January 1995 • Five of us at Fenwick & West LLP represented MIT. The validity of the RSA patent was recognized by all parties when the litigation settled in December 1996. • There was never any trial. • The settlement gave a boost to exclusive licensee RSA Data Security, Inc. RSADSI was able to establish a toehold in the field of non-governmental use of encryption important because the government was trying to stifle the technology using export control law • MIT collected royalties until 2000 Other patent litigations involved Stanford. • Stanford had three PKC patents • Interference with MIT’s patent 10 Lingering Issues of PKC U.S. government still regulates the export of encryption items. • no regulation of the authentication side of the cryptography coin • gradual loosening of regulations since 1995 exports now regulated by Commerce Department, not State Department very complicated regulations FBI and other LE still want backdoors into encryption algorithms to fight crime. • but nefarious entities could also enter the backdoors • a nefarious entity could be someone associated with the government PKC is slow compared to symmetric cryptography. • bit lengths forced to get longer and longer as computers get faster and faster • used primarily to set up an encrypted channel (e.g., VPN, SSL, TLS) o symmetric encryption then takes over Technical threat from quantum computing and its projected great computational power. 11 Stay Safe! Ed Radlo Radlo & Su Silicon Valley, CA www.radloip.com [email protected] 12.
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