Andrew Odlyzko
More info
- Affiliation
- Bell Labs / AT&T, University of Minnesota
- Known for
- Discrete logarithms, attacks on knapsack ciphers
Mathematician who spent decades at Bell Labs and AT&T working out how hard cryptography's supposedly hard problems really were.
Odlyzko's 1984 survey of discrete-logarithm algorithms in finite fields became the yardstick for how large Diffie–Hellman parameters actually need to be. With Jeffrey Lagarias he showed in 1985 how lattice reduction breaks low-density knapsack cryptosystems — one of the lattice attacks that saw the whole family quietly abandoned.
He also computed zeros of the Riemann zeta function in record numbers and, after moving to the University of Minnesota, turned to network economics. There he punctured a couple of myths: that internet traffic was doubling every hundred days, and that a network's value grows with the square of its users. His counter-proposal is a far more modest n log n.