http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/technology/cryptography-pioneers-to-win-turing-award.html
Some fun facts:
- If you're living in the South SF Bay, DH was invented in a room near you.
- DH was invented before RSA, yet RSA won Turing Award more than a decade earlier.
- GCHQ, the NSA of UK, claimed that they had invented public key crypto two years earlier than DH, but Diffie didn't think so.
- While RSA is becoming obsolete, DH is and will be the backbone of Internet security for years to come. Whenever you connect to Google or Facebook, you're using DH.
- DH used a math trick that nobody knows how hard it really is. It must be very hard because nobody knows how to solve it in the last 40 years (modulo some discoveries that decrease its hardness).
- But the trick is surprisingly simple. Any sixth grader can understand how it works.
- Hellman was a Stanford professor, but Diffie was a software engineer that happened to love crypto. My chance of winning the award suddenly has increased from zero to epsilon =)