Although I am not an expert at all, I have a personal interest in crypto stuff, from an ethical and political as well as from a technical point of view.
I use PGP (here are my keys) whenever my correspondents accept it and advise anyone to do the same. I share the feeling, so well expressed by Phil Zimmermann in his outstanding user guide for PGP, that encrypting one's e-mail should be as natural as sealing one's correspondence in a paper envelope instead of exposing it to the world on a postcard.
|
Whitfield Diffie invented public key cryptography in 1975; he is one of the Good Guys (tm) and he is also a fascinating speaker. If there were a Whitfield Diffie fan club, I'd probably subscribe to it at once. But there isn't one yet (I asked him). However there is at least a web page where you can find some pictures of him while lecturing. |
Are you all too familiar with these flakey explanations of the RSA public key algorithm, with numbers raised to powers and plenty of handwaving to reassure you that everything will work even if in practice all the important bits of the explanation are missing? If yes, you would have loved Whit's talk, Hardy's Mistake: The Unexpected Applicability of Pure Mathematics to Cryptography, given at Cambridge's Gonville and Caius College on the 1st and 8th of March, 1996. Fortunately, you can get the postscript for his slides from here (part 1 and part 2). Sadly, they don't seem to print out too well on A4 -- but you won't miss any of the text.
