Public Key Cryptography
The concept of public-key cryptography was invented by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, and independently by Ralph Merkle.Their contribution to cryptography was the notion that keys could come in pairs—an encryption key and a decryption key—and that it could be infeasible to generate one key from the other. Diffie and Hellman first presented this concept at the 1976 National Computer Conference ; a few months later, their seminal paper “ New Directions in Cryptography ” was published....