Making Enemies with the NSA - with Martin Hellman (2015 Turing Award)

Turing Award recipient Martin Hellman discusses his career with Oxford Mathematician Dr Tom Crawford, including how he went to war with the NSA over public key cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange. Recorded at the 2023 Heidelberg Laureate Forum. Find out more about the event at https://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/ The story begins in the 1960's and Martin's early work in cryptography at IBM Research. He meets Whitfield Diffie and in 1976 the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange is created - allowing information to be sent securely online. As the field of cryptography is being developed, Martin faces opposition from the National Security Agency (NSA), but he refuses to back down. He explains his reasons for this, and how it was finally resolved. In the 1980's Martin switched his focus to the nuclear threat and began working on educating the public on the risk of nuclear annihilation. More information can be found on his website: http://nuclearrisk.org/ Seven years ago Martin published a book, co-authored with his wife, entitled "A new map for relationships: creating true love at home and peace on the planet". You can download the PDF version for free here: https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/publications/book3.pdf The ACM A.M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community". The Turing Award is recognized as the "highest distinction in computer science" and "Nobel Prize of Computing". The award is named after Alan Mathison Turing, mathematician and reader in mathematics at the University of Manchester. From 2007 to 2013, the award was accompanied by a prize of US$250,000. Effective 2014, the funding level has been increased to US$1 million, i.e. four times the previous amount Martin Hellman received the Turing Award in 2015 along with Whitfield Diffie for inventing and promulgating both asymmetric public-key cryptography, including its application to digital signatures, and a practical cryptographic key-exchange method. Links to other videos and publications mentioned in the video are below. HLF 10 - Lightning Talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euWWcuGdCwM C. E. Shannon, "Communication theory of secrecy systems," in The Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 656-715, Oct. 1949, doi: 10.1002/j.1538-7305.1949.tb00928.x. WSJ Ukraine Poll: file:///Volumes/ElementsNEW/HLF10/Hellman/WSJ_NORC_Ukraine_Poll_June_2022.pdf Links to Tom's other interviews with Laureates in Maths and Computer Science. Whitfield Diffie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaanzpCkc8c Lesley Lamport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPVvReKyhmw Alessio Figalli: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oob466Ia9f4 Martin Hairer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6XP3n-Sjiw Michael Atiyah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alujy8SVIDM Daniel Spielman: https://youtu.be/SVfabuPRkYg Efim Zelmanov: https://youtu.be/Nz3_RzZzuO8 Produced by Dr Tom Crawford at the University of Oxford. Tom is Public Engagement Lead at the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education: https://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/ For more maths content check out Tom's website https://tomrocksmaths.com/ You can also follow Tom on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @tomrocksmaths. https://www.facebook.com/tomrocksmaths/ https://twitter.com/tomrocksmaths https://www.instagram.com/tomrocksmaths/ Get your Tom Rocks Maths merchandise here: https://www.beautifulequation.com/collections/tom-rocks-maths With thanks to Martin Hellman Heidelberg Laureate Forum Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation IBM Research MIT Museum Chuck Painter/Stanford News Service Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser Roger Dudley RTC at English Wikipedia