Stephen C. Pohlig (1952/1953 in Washington, D.C. – April 14, 2017) was an American electrical engineer who worked in the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. As a graduate student of Martin Hellman's at Stanford University in the mid-1970s, he helped develop the underlying concepts of Diffie-Hellman key exchange, including the Pohlig–Hellman exponentiation cipher and the Pohlig–Hellman algorithm for computing discrete logarithms. That cipher can be regarded as a predecessor to the RSA (cryptosystem) since all that is needed to transform it into RSA is to change the arithmetic from modulo a prime number to modulo a composite number.
In his spare time Stephen Pohlig was a keen kayaker known to many throughout the New England area.
Pohlig died on April 14, 2017, at the age of 64 after fighting gallbladder cancer for a year.
Bibliography
- S. Pohlig and M. Hellman, "An improved algorithm for computing logarithms over GF(p) and its cryptographic significance (Corresp.)," Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on 24, no. 1 (1978): 106-110.
- Martin E. Hellman and Stephen C. Pohlig, "United States Patent: 4424414 - Exponentiation cryptographic apparatus and method," January 3, 1984.
References
- Savage, Neil (June 2016). "The Key to Privacy". Communications of the ACM. 59 (6): 12–14. doi:10.1145/2911979. S2CID 34371266. Retrieved 2016-07-14.
- Oral history interview with Martin Hellman, 2004, Palo Alto, California. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
- "STEPHEN POHLIG Obituary (2017) - Concord, MA - Boston Globe". Legacy.com. Retrieved 15 December 2023.
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