Discrete Logarithms and Diffie Hellman

In 1976, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman published their now famous paper [38] entitled “New Directions in Cryptography.” In this paper they formulated the concept of a public key encryption system and made several groundbreaking contributions to this new field. A short time earlier, Ralph Merkle had independently isolated one of the fundamental problems and invented a public key construction for an undergraduate project in a computer science class at Berkeley, but this was little understood at the time. Merkle’s work “Secure communication over insecure channels” appeared in 1982 [83].