History of RSA Conference. Martin Hellman, Stanford University, 1971-Present

Martin Hellman was at the first RSA Conference in 1991. He is best known for his invention, with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle, of public key cryptography, the technology that, among other uses, enables secure Internet transactions. It is used to transfer literally trillions of dollars every day. He has been a long-time contributor to the computer privacy debate, and was a key participant in the "first crypto war" of the late 1970s and early 80s that established the right of academic cryptographic researchers to publish their papers, free of government interference. His work has been recognized by a number of honors and awards, including election to the National Academy of Engineering and the million-dollar ACM Turing Award, often called "the Nobel Prize of Computer Science." Hellman remembers the early days of the RSA Conference in this special Cybercrime Magazine episode.