Something Better Change: When Does 40 Quadrillion Years Become One Day?

After data breaches which do properly use encryption, 2018 feels a lot like 1977

In August 1977, The Stranglers were in the charts with “Something Better Change” and something really was changing, and it something that would change the world forever. This was the month that Martin Gardner, in his Scientific American column, posted a challenge of a method that has stood the test of time: RSA.

It related to the work of R(ivest), A(dleman) and S(hamir) and was a puzzle on their discovery of a method which allowed two keys to be created, where one could encrypt, and the other to decrypt. Their work had been based on a proposal from Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman on trapdoor functions that could be used to create the key pair.

In order to explain the RSA concept, Martin’s provided a background the Diffie-Hellman method for which he outlined:

Then in 1975 a new…