Heilman, Martin

DiHe76 Whitfield Diffie, Martin E. Heilman New Directions in Cryptography IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 22/6 (1976) 644-654. 

PoHe78 Stephen C. Pohlig, Martin E. Heilman An Improved Algorithm for Computing Logarithms over GF(p) and its Cryptographic Significance IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 10/1 (1978) 106-110. 

When DES was standardized, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Heilman estimated that it would be possible to build a DES-cracking computer for 20 million that would crack a DES key in a day. In 1993, Michael Wiener designed on paper a special purpose brute force DES-cracking computer that he estimated could be built for 1 million and would crack an average DES key in about three and a half hours. In 1997, Wiener updated his analysis based on then-current computers, estimating that a 1 million machine would crack keys in 35 minutes. 

The concept of public key cryptography was originally proposed in 1976 by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Heilman, and independently by Ralph Merkle. In 1997, Britain s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) released previously classified documents revealing three British government employees, James Ellis, Clifford Cocks, and Malcolm Williamson, developed these same ideas several years earlier, but kept them secret for reasons of national security. There is some evidence that the United States National Security Agency (NSA)... 

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