My PGP Story

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My PGP Story

In the early eighties, when I was at Boston University, I often visited the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, on the seventh floor of 545 Technology Square, near the Kendall/MIT subway stop.

On one of my visits I came across the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science Technical Memo 82 (MIT LCS TM-82): a work by three professors named Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman. In plain language, and a small amount of high-school-level mathematics, TM-82 described how to implement a public key cryptosystem using the inherent difficulty in factoring prime numbers, a technique itself invented only a year earlier by Whitfield Diffie.

A rumor swept the Boston computing scene that the "National Security Agency", having heard about the pending release of TM-82 (or it's incarnation in Scientific American), attempted to prevent publication. The rumor continues by suggesting that Ron Rivest, the `R' in RSA, walked around the MIT campus, tacking up copies of TM-82, and then called the NSA back to tell them how sorry he was to have to inform them the paper was already in the public domain.) [I'm only telling you what I heard; I haven't spoken with Dr. Rivest about this matter.]

I was smitten, and wrote a small RSA tool to prove that I understood the paper. My work stopped when I realized that a good version needed to be able to use more bits than the longest word of the computer I was using at the time: a 64-bit IBM 3084 mainframe. I started playing around with a "bignum" package, but was sucked back into classes, and shortly thereafter, Real Work.

In a move that's stranger than fiction, MIT at some point gave exclusive rights to the RSA algorithm to a west coast company, Public Key Partners. Those of us who were coding from TM-82 or from the Scientific American article, presented as mathematical curiosities for the public domain, became legally in the wrong, even if we weren't trying to sell our programs.

Philip Zimmermann persevered when I stumbled. He implemented a working RSA cryptosystem, which he named Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP. The rest is history.

Have you found errors nontrivial or marginal, factual, analytical and illogical, arithmetical, temporal, or even typographical? Please let me know; drop me email. Thanks!
 

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