To A Life Dedicated To Anonymity …

Our cybersecurity world has not been built by large and faceless companies, but by individuals who created truly inspirational work and who have since provided us with the foundations of our digital world. And thus we turn to people like Ron Rivest, Whitfield Diffie, Ralph Merkle [here], Adi Shamir [here], Stephen Pohlig [here] … and to David Lee Chaum.

David has contributed so much to cybersecurity, and especially around anonymity methods. In 1981, he laid down a foundation of anonymity with his paper on “Untraceable Electronic Mail, Return Addresses, and Digital Pseudonyms”. He also went on to develop the first anonymised electronic cash method (ecash) and created the first electronic money company (DigiCash).

In 1991, the mighty Torben Pedersen published his classic paper of “Non-interactive and information-theoretic secure verifiable secret sharing.” [pdf] and were he outlined a method that would soon be known as a Pedersen Commitment [here]:

This method is now being used extensively with anonmyisation in cryptocurrencies. Pedersen actually acknowledges that his paper owned a great deal to an unpublished paper written by Chaum. In the same year they collaborated…