Name Stephen Pohlig | ||
Stephen Pohlig (deceased April 14, 2017) was an electrical engineer currently working at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. As a graduate student of Martin Hellman's at Stanford University in the mid-1970s, he helped develop the underlying concepts of Diffie-Hellman key exchange, including the Pohlig–Hellman exponentiation cipher and the Pohlig–Hellman algorithm for computing discrete logarithms. That cipher can be regarded as a predecessor to the RSA (cryptosystem) since all that is needed to transform it into RSA is to change the arithmetic from modulo a prime number to modulo a composite number.
In his spare time Stephen Pholig was a keen kayker known to many throughout the New England area.
References
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