PKI Co-inventor Praises Arcot

"Finally there is a cost-effective and convenient means to strongly authenticate users and transactions over the Internet without the need for cumbersome hardware," said Martin Hellman, co-inventor of PKI.

If anyone knows about PKI, it's Martin Hellman, one of its co-inventors and a retired professor at Stanford. Recently, Hellman said that since the invention of public key cryptography twenty-five years ago, people have been struggling to secure the private key without the assistance of hardware. "Arcot has solved this problem," he said.

In 1976, Hellman and Bailey Whitfield "Whit" Diffie published the paper "New Directions in Cryptography" that introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys. Their approach, known as Diffie-Hellman key exchange, took a giant step toward solving public key distribution, one of the fundamental problems of cryptography. Their article also stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, asymmetric key algorithms like those Arcot uses today.

For further information about Arcot's software-based security solutions, contact Arcot at 408-969-6100 or visit www.arcot.com.