The Patents That Built The Security of The Internet: Shamir-Fiat, Schnorr, Brachtl, GQ, and Kravitz

As a researcher, it is not only important to know where we are and where we are going, but it is just as important to know where we have been, and how current practice has evolved. At any point in time, we may back-track to a method that we forgot about, and develop new areas of research. Also the flaws and weaknesses that stopped a method from being developed might be overcome by new knowledge. The skill of the researcher is to understand this complex history, and make sense of it.

So I love reading classic research papers on the past, and in trying to build a timeline of thought that supports the advancement in technology. And so in Cybersecurity, we see much of the foundation of the field defined in the 1980s and laid out in terms of classic patents. For this I’ve defined the six classic patents that provide the core of much of what we have today in terms of encryption:

IT’S ALL GREEK TO ME: The Six Patents That Laid The Foundations of Cybersecurity

Now let’s push into the late 1980s and onto the 1990s, and see how these classic patents developed into areas of…