Ralph Merkle
loreThe third name on the public-key patent with Diffie and Hellman, who arrived at the idea independently as a student, and the inventor of the hash tree that carries his name.
His undergraduate project proposed a way for two parties to establish a secret in public, and was rejected by a reviewer who did not believe the problem was worth solving. The Kanellakis award in 1996 lists him with Diffie, Hellman, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman for the conception and first effective realisation of public-key cryptography. The tree structure he described later became the standard way to prove that one item belongs to a large set without shipping the set, which is why it turns up in certificate transparency, in backups and in ledgers.
Also known as: merkle
Sources
- ACM A.M. Turing Award - Whitfield Diffie, laureate page
- Merkle's own archive, in his own words: in the Fall of 1974, as an undergraduate, he enrolled in CS244 at UC Berkeley and submitted the project proposal that became Merkle's puzzles; the page carries the scanned proposal, the paper as published in April 1978 and the Communications of the ACM rejection letter of 22 October 1975