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Concept

Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

Technique

A method allowing two parties to jointly establish a shared secret key over an insecure channel without ever transmitting the key itself, relying on the practical difficulty of the discrete logarithm problem; the foundation of much of modern key exchange.

Facts
Origin Year
1976 1
Core Principle
A method that lets two parties who share no prior secret establish a shared cryptographic key over a public channel an eavesdropper can observe, using the difficulty of certain mathematical problems to keep the shared key secret even though the exchanged values are public. 1
Connections

Base Language For

Elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman adapts the Diffie-Hellman key exchange to elliptic curve groups, a variant credited to Victor Miller and Neal Koblitz in 1985.

In Field

Cryptography, Fields

Invented

Martin Hellman co-authored the 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography with Whitfield Diffie that introduced the key exchange protocol bearing their names.

Whitfield Diffie co-authored the 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography with Martin Hellman that introduced the key exchange protocol bearing their names.

Sources
1. Wikipedia: Diffie-Hellman key exchange
Wikimedia Foundation
  • Lead section, first paragraph
    Published in 1976 by Diffie and Hellman, this is the earliest publicly known work that proposed the idea of a private key and a corresponding public key.
  • Lead section, second paragraph
    The Diffie-Hellman key exchange method allows two parties that have no prior knowledge of each other to jointly establish a shared secret key over an insecure channel.
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