Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman release their proposal for a breakthrough in cryptographic communication: the first implementation of public/private key pairs for secure communication over public channels.
Diffie-Hellman Day is a commemoration of their groundbreaking work in 1976, who introduced the concept of public-key cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm. This innovation revolutionized secure data transmission over public channels, enabling two parties to establish a shared secret key without actually exchanging the key itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange
My crypto prof back in university mentioned that the first time he heard about this when it came out, he thought exchanging secrets over insecure channels was impossible so there must be something wrong with this scheme. Maybe they were laughed out the room first because of "secure communications over public channels", haha
It’s mindblowing how mindbowing this must have been at the time.
cryptographers when they heard the first time about DH in 1976
Indeed. They had trouble publishing it too, unless I misremember
Started a revolution in private communication
