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God rewards fools
As Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman pursued the key distribution problem, they were joined by
graduate student Ralph Merkle, who shared their enthusiasm for solving what seemed to be an impossible
problem. Hellman commented:
Ralph, like us, was willing to be a fool. And the way to get to the top of the heap in terms of developing original
research is to be a fool, because only fools keep trying. You have idea number 1, you get excited, and it flops.
Then you have idea number 2, you get excited, and it flops. Then you have idea number 99, you get excited,
and it flops. Only a fool would be excited by the 100th idea, but it might take 100 ideas before one really pays
off. Unless you're foolish enough to be continually excited, you won't have the motivation, you won't have the
energy to carry it through. God rewards fools. 16
A truly cryptic development
An interesting postscript to the encryp-
tion story takes us back to the secrecy that sur-
rounded the cryptographic work on the Enigma
and Lorenz codes at Bletchley Park during World
War II. After the war, the government of the
United Kingdom concentrated its code-breaking
efforts in a new agency called the Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in
Cheltenham ( Fig. 12.19 ). By the 1960s, the British
military had recognized the need for secure
communications between troops in the field but
was concerned about the logistics and costs of
key distribution. GCHQ set some of its research-
ers on the problem, and the result was that, as
Simon Singh says: “By 1975, James Ellis, Clifford
Cocks and Malcolm Williamson had discovered
all the fundamental aspects of public-key cryp-
tography, yet they all had to remain silent.” 17 It
was not until 1997 that Cocks was finally allowed
to present a brief history of GCHQ's indepen-
dent discovery of public-key cryptography. The same zeal for secrecy of successive U.K. governments denied
Tommy Flowers meaningful recognition for his pioneering work in building the Colossus computers after
the end of World War II.
Fig. 12.19. An aerial photo shows the GCHQ, the British agency respon-
sible for communications security, based in Cheltenham, U.K. Two
Colossus computers from Bletchley Park went to GCHQ after the war;
the remaining eight were destroyed on Churchill's orders.
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