Ralph Merkle

Ralph C. Merkle ( born February 2, 1952 in the U.S.) is a scientist who is one of the pioneers of asymmetric cryptosystems.

Life and work

Merkle comes from the third generation of Swiss immigrants. His father Ted Merkle was the principal scientists of Project Pluto at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, developed the nuclear reactor -powered intercontinental ballistic missiles. His sister Judith Merkle Riley written historical novels. His wife Carol Shaw was an early computer game designer (3 D Tic Tac Toe, 1979) at Atari. His great-uncle Fred Merkle (1888-1956) was a famous baseball player. He attended Livermore High School ( completion 1970) and then studied computer science at the University of California, Berkeley (Bachelor in 1974, master's degree, 1977). He received his Ph.D. in 1979 in electrical engineering at Stanford University ( Secrecy, authentication and public key systems), where it was already mid-1970s to work with his teacher in Hellman public-key cryptography.

By 1974, he proposed a public-key protocol, Merkle's puzzle, however, was not published until 1978. Together with Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman he developed the method for the Diffie -Hellman key exchange. The system proposed by Merkle and Hellman based on the knapsack problem public-key cryptosystem ( Merkle -Hellman cryptosystem ) was broken in 1982 by Adi Shamir.

Later he was a professor of computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Currently, he is concerned with questions about computer security and molecular nanotechnology. He is a director at Alcor, a company in Arizona that deals with cryonics of people. From Merkle hash trees come next and the Merkle - Damgård construction and the hash algorithm Snefru and Khufu and Khafre block ciphers that.

For his involvement in the invention of public-key cryptography, he received, among others, the Kobayashi Award of the IEEE, 1996, Paris Kanellakis Award of the ACM and the 2000 RSA Award. He is a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research ( IACR ).

Writings

  • Ralph C. Merkle, Secrecy, authentication, and public key systems, UMI Research Press, 1982, ISBN 0-8357-1384-9.
  • Robert A. Freitas, Ralph C. Merkle, Kinematic Self- Replicating Machines, Landes Bioscience, 2004, ISBN 1-57059-690-5.
Merkle's Puzzles Information security Merkle tree Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Association for Computing Machinery
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