The Bluffers Guide to Discrete Logarithms, And How They Protected and Changed Our World

Strap yourself in, we are going to go on a wonderful journey of discovery.

Preface

We should all have a magic switch that pushes aside our worries and replaces them with something that takes our woes away. So, when I’ve had a long and tiring day, and there are things buzzing in my head — I don’t count sheep, I ponder the wonder of discrete logarithms, and in the magical ways they have solved our many online security. It relaxes me and pushes out all of those academic stresses.

This academic year, we were so lucky to speak to some of the people who properly built the foundations of our online security. This included Marty Hellman (co-inventor of the Diffie-Hellman method), Tahir ElGamal (inventor of the ElGamal encryption method), and Neal Koblitz (co-inventor of Elliptic Curve Cryptography — ECC). In this article, I will trace the roots of this security, and outline how discrete logs paved the way for the rise of ECC.