We know it's possible. We know it's valuable. We should do it.
Ralph C. Merkle is a researcher in public key cryptography, and more recently a researcher and speaker on
molecular nanotechnologyMolecular nanotechnology is a technology based on the ability to build structures to complex, atomic specifications by means of mechanosynthesis. This is distinct from nanoscale materials...
and
cryonicsCryonics is the low-temperature preservation of humans and animals who can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine, with the hope that healing and resuscitation may be possible in the future. Cryopreservation of people or large animals is not reversible with current technology...
. Merkle appears in the
science fictionScience fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
novel
The Diamond AgeThe Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a postcyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. It is to some extent a science fiction bildungsroman, focused on a young girl named Nell, and set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life. The novel deals with themes of...
, involving nanotechnology.
Biography
Merkle graduated from
Livermore High SchoolFounded in 1891, Livermore High School is a public high school located in the city of Livermore, California, USA, and is part of the Livermore Valley Joint Unified School District . In 2007, it was chosen as one in four schools in Alameda County to receive the California Distinguished School...
in 1970 and proceeded to study
Computer ScienceComputer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
at the
University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, obtaining his B.A. in 1974, and his M.S. in 1977. In 1979 he received his Ph.D. in
Electrical EngineeringElectrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...
at
Stanford UniversityThe Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
, with a thesis entitled Secrecy, authentication and public key systems. His advisor was
Martin HellmanMartin Edward Hellman is an American cryptologist, and is best known for his invention of public key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle...
. Ralph Merkle is the grandnephew of baseball star
Fred MerkleFrederick Charles Merkle , also known as "Bonehead" Merkle, was an American first baseman in Major League Baseball...
, the son of Theodore Charles Merkle, director of
Project PlutoProject Pluto was a United States government program to develop nuclear powered ramjet engines for use in cruise missiles. Two experimental engines were tested at the United States Department of Energy Nevada Test Site in 1961 and 1964.-History:...
and the brother of
Judith Merkle RileyJudith Merkle Riley was a U.S. writer and academic who wrote six historical romance novels from 1988 to 1999.-Biography:...
, a historical writer.
He was the manager of
compilerA compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...
development at
ElxsiElxsi was a minicomputer manufacturing company established in the late 1970s along with a host of other competitors . The Elxsi processor was an Emitter Coupled Logic design that featured a 50 nanosecond clock, a 25 nanosecond backpanel bus, IEEE floating point arithmetic and a 64-bit architecture...
from 1980. In 1988, he became a research scientist at
Xerox PARCPARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....
. In 1999 he became a Nanotechnology Theorist for
ZyvexZyvex was the first molecular nanotechnology company, founded by James R. Von Ehr II in 1997.In April 2007, the corporation split into four components: Zyvex Technologies, Zyvex Instruments , Zyvex Labs, and Zyvex Asia....
. In 2003 he became a Distinguished Professor at Georgia Tech. In 2006 he returned to the Bay Area, where he has been a Senior Research Fellow at IMM, a faculty member at
Singularity UniversitySingularity University is an academic institution in Silicon Valley whose stated aim is to "assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s...
, and a Board member of the
Alcor Life Extension FoundationThe Alcor Life Extension Foundation, most often referred to as Alcor, is a Scottsdale, Arizona, USA-based nonprofit company that researches, advocates for and performs cryonics, the preservation of humans in liquid nitrogen after legal death, with hopes of restoring them to full health when new...
. He was awarded the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 2010.
Merkle devised a scheme for communication over an insecure channel:
Merkle's PuzzlesIn cryptography, Merkle's Puzzles is an early construction for a public-key cryptosystem, a protocol devised by Ralph Merkle in 1974 and published in 1978. It allows two parties to agree on a shared secret by exchanging messages, even if they have no secrets in common...
. He co-invented the Merkle–Hellman knapsack cryptosystem, Merkle–Damgård construction, and invented
Merkle treeIn cryptography and computer science Hash trees or Merkle trees are a type of data structure which contains a tree of summary information about a larger piece of data – for instance a file – used to verify its contents. Hash trees are a combination of hash lists and hash chaining, which in turn are...
s. While at
Xerox PARCPARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....
, Merkle designed the
Khufu and KhafreIn cryptography, Khufu and Khafre are two block ciphers designed by Ralph Merkle in 1989 while working at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center...
block cipherIn cryptography, a block cipher is a symmetric key cipher operating on fixed-length groups of bits, called blocks, with an unvarying transformation. A block cipher encryption algorithm might take a 128-bit block of plaintext as input, and output a corresponding 128-bit block of ciphertext...
s, and the
SnefruSnefru is a cryptographic hash function invented by Ralph Merklein 1990which supports 128-bit and 256-bit output. It was named after the Egyptian Pharaoh Sneferu, continuing the tradition of the Khufu and Khafre block ciphers....
hash function.
Merkle is married to
Carol ShawOriginally an Atari employee, Carol Shaw is said to be the first female video game designer . Later she joined Activision, where she programmed her best known game, River Raid...
, the video game designer best known for her game,
River RaidRiver Raid is a scrolling shooter videogame and was released in 1982 by Activision for the Atari 2600, and later the Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit, C64, ColecoVision, IBM PCjr, Intellivision, ZX Spectrum, and MSX...
'
External links
- Ralph Merkle's personal website
- Ralph Merkle's video introduction to Molecular Nanotechnology on YouTube
- First document describing public key cryptography
- Oral history interview with Martin Hellman Oral history interview 2004, Palo Alto, California. Charles Babbage Institute
The Charles Babbage Institute is a research center at the University of Minnesota specializing in the history of information technology, particularly the history since 1935 of digital computing, programming/software, and computer networking....
, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. HellmanMartin Edward Hellman is an American cryptologist, and is best known for his invention of public key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle...
describes his invention of public key cryptography with collaborators Whitfield DiffieBailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie is an American cryptographer and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography.Diffie and Martin Hellman's paper New Directions in Cryptography was published in 1976...
and Ralph Merkle at Stanford University in the mid-1970s. He also relates his subsequent work in cryptography with Steve Pohlig (the Pohlig-Hellman system) and others. Hellman addresses the National Security AgencyThe National Security Agency/Central Security Service is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S...
’s (NSA) early efforts to contain and discourage academic work in the field, the Department of Commerce’s encryption export restrictions, and key escrow (the so-called Clipper chipThe Clipper chip was a chipset that was developed and promoted by the U.S. National Security Agency as an encryption device to be adopted by telecommunications companies for voice transmission...
). He also touches on the commercialization of cryptography with RSA Data Security and VeriSignVerisign, Inc. is an American company based in Dulles, Virginia that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the .com, .net, and .name generic top-level domains and the .cc and .tv country-code...
.
- Merkle's Ph.D. thesis
- The First Ten Years of Public-Key Cryptography Whitfield Diffie, Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 76, no. 5, May 1988, pp: 560-577 (1.9MB PDF file)
- Who's Who in the Nanospace