PKC is a form of cryptography that allows users to communicate securely using a public and a private shared secret key. The private key is kept secret while the public key can be distributed.
PKC is the brainchild of Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, two PhDs who published a paper introducing the technology in November of 1976. Both men were present to tell the tale on Thursday night.
"This is really a birthday of something that happened about five miles from here so we're technically on crypto holy ground," said Dan Boneh, professor of computer science at Stanford University, in his introduction.
Diffie, 62, said that his motivation to invent secure channels of communication stemmed from his "antiestablishment" disposition back in those days. He said that he was wandering around his house trying to figure out how two parties could communicate securely, when he came up with the idea of detaching the decryption process from the encryption process and separating the keys.
Thus was born the 1976 paper called "New Directions in Cryptography." Diffie and Hellman's invention of PKC is impressive because it was so organic. It did not come out of the Department of Defense, but rather from a couple of earthy and crunchy PhDs.
"This was an independent discovery of other minds not working in an industry that was supportive of such work," said Brian Snow, retired NSA technical director for the Information Assurance Directorate. "My hat goes off to these gentlemen who figured this out because the world has not been the same since."
Also on the panel, Ray Ozzie, chief software architect for Microsoft, and Jim Bidzos, security leader for RSA and founder of VeriSign, who talked about the early days developing business models for PKC.
"There were inventors that wanted to be paid for their invention and there were vendors that wanted to use it but didn't want to pay very much for it," Bidzos said. "So we worked hard to build a business out of it."
Even though the mood was congratulatory, no one patted one another on the back and said, "Wow, we've come so far." On the contrary, most speakers had more of an it's-about-time attitude.
"A number of us wanted to create an online community and believed that micro computers and PCs were coming out so we got a LAN card and we believed that any day would be the year of the LAN and computers would be everywhere," Ozzie said. "This was 1982."
"I think we were expecting things to happen sooner," Hellman said. "We thought this would happen in five or 10 years and it actually took 10 or 20 or 25. I remember thinking that the time would not be far off when electronic funds transfer would be used to buy a loaf of bread but it is just happening now. So I'm gratified to see it happening finally but I think it should have happened sooner."
Perhaps 30 years is too long for an evolving technology by current standards but panelists agreed that it is because security is such an uphill battle.
"Believe it or not, there are people out there who want to get you and get to your data and they're a lot smarter than they were when they were just robbing banks," Snow said.