Ode To John Napier, The NSA and FIPS 186: Meet DSA — The Original Builder of Digital Trust

I am so proud to work in a university that has one of its campuses built around John Napier’s Tower. It is thus a privilege to be in a place that sourced one of the greatest mathematical discoveries: logarithms. And, for a while, it was discrete logarithms that secured the Internet and where:

and:

For this Whitfield Diffie and Marty Hellman define the Diffie-Hellman method and that allowed us to use discrete logarithms to create a secret key. While this has now been mainly replaced by more efficient elliptic curve methods, the usage of discrete logarithms is still a valid method of key exchange. Well, with this we have the DSA digital signature method.

The DSA patent (No 5,231,668) was created by David W. Kravitz (an ex-NSA employee) and assigned to the USA in a royalty-free way:

David spent 11 years at the NSA and is currently a Senior Director of Research at Spring Labs [here]: