Public-Key Cryptography - Codes: The Guide to Secrecy from Ancient to Modern Times - page 172

4.2 RSA
If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth
without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathe-
matics
Roger Bacon (ca. 1214-1292), English philosopher and scientist
— from Opus Majus (bk. 1, ch. 4)
We have given some biographical information for one of the three gentle-
men who make up the acronym for this section (see page 159). It is time to
give some information about the the other two. Adi Shamir is an Israeli cryp-
tographer, who is currently the Borman Professor in the Applied Mathematics
Department of the Weizman Institute of Science in Israel. He obtained his Ph.D.
from Stanford in 1977 after which he did postdoctoral work at Warwick Univer-
sity in England. Shamir's name is attached to a wide variety of cryptographic
schemes, many of which we will study in this text, including the Fiat-Shamir
identification protocol, RSA, DC (see Footnote 3.4 on page 127), and his poly-
nomial secret-sharing scheme, to mention only a few. On April 14, 2003, the
ACM formally announced that the A.M. Turing Award (essentially the “Nobel
Prize of computer science”) would go to Adleman, Shamir, and Rivest for their
developmental work on PKC.
Leonard Adleman was born on December 31, 1945, in San Francisco, Cali-
fornia. He received his B.Sc. in mathematics from the University of California
at Berkeley in 1972 and his Ph.D. there in 1976. His doctoral thesis was done
under the guidance of Manuel Blum, and was titled, Number Theoretic As-
pects of Computational Complexity . He is married with three children, and
is currently Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer Science and Professor of
Molecular Biology at the University of Southern California Los Angeles, Cali-
fornia, where he has been since 1980. His professional interests are algorithms;
computational complexity; computer viruses; cryptography; DNA computing;
immunology; molecular biology; number theory; and quantum computing. His
most recent activity is the building of a DNA computer, which has the potential
for a vastly faster computation for the future. He noticed that a protein, called
polymerase , which produces complementary strands of DNA, resembles the op-
eration of a Turing machine (see page 503). Adleman reached the conclusion
that DNA formation essentially functions in a fashion similar to a computer, so
he is interested in constructing a viable DNA computer.
Although the Di8e-Hellman key-exchange protocol, discussed on page 166,
was the genesis of a profound investigation into the notion of PKC, their scheme
did not provide a complete solution to the establishment of a complete PKC.
They only provided a mechanism for the exchange of keys, and by the authors'
own admission, left open the problem of establishing a working secure PKC (see
page 99). The first to (publicly) do this, as we know, have their names attached
to the acronym that did provide such a solution.