Martin Hellman
More info
- Born
- Known for
- Diffie–Hellman key exchange
- Award
- Turing Award 2015
- Nationality
- American
One half of Diffie–Hellman — and the author who has most stubbornly insisted a third name belongs on the paper.
American electrical engineer, professor at Stanford. With Whitfield Diffie he published New Directions in Cryptography in 1976, the paper showing how two parties can agree on a shared key over a channel someone is listening to. Until then, encryption assumed the parties had already met or trusted a courier.
Hellman has consistently argued that Ralph Merkle's contribution is equal, proposing the name Diffie–Hellman–Merkle. The Turing Award arrived in 2015, forty years after the paper, shared with Diffie. Since the 1980s he has spent more time on nuclear risk than on cryptography.