Martin Hellman is an American cryptographer known for co-inventing public key cryptography with

Whitfield Diffy and Ralph Merkel in the 1970s. Their groundbreaking Diffy-Helman key exchange method

allowed secure communication over insecure channels, laying the foundation for modern encryption protocols.

Helman has also contributed to cybersecurity policy and ethical discussions on nuclear risk.

His work has had a lasting impact on cryptography, internet security, and global information protection.

Martin received the 2015 Turing Award together with Whitfield Diffy, quote, for inventing

and promulmigating both asymmetric public key cryptography,

including its application to digital signatures and a practical cryptographic key exchange method.

In this episode, he joins Gregor Van to talk about his life and career.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist and is the founder and CTO of MailPass.

Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance, and general software engineering

companies.

He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk.

Music via his profile at vand.hk.

Hi, Martin. Welcome to Software Engineering Daily.

Well, thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Yeah, it's great to have you here, Martin. This is an exciting opportunity for all of us to get to hear about the work that you have done spanning many decades. So today we've got Martin Helman

and we're going to be hearing all about cryptography. We're going to be talking about nuclear

strategies. And then we're also going to

hear about Martin's book. So we're going to go right back to the beginning, though. I mean,

a lot of your life was all around public key cryptography. I would just love to start hearing,

where's this start in your life? Well, it starts in 1966 to 68 when I was a graduate student at Stanford,

...