[Cryptography] "‘The intelligence coup of the century’"

[Bill Stewart]

On 2/12/2020 5:09 PM, Ryan Carboni wrote:
> Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
>> So how did we get directed down the RSA path and not the Diffie-Hellman
> path?

I see 2.5 big advantages of RSA over DH
- DH is interactive, while RSA works just fine with publishing a public 
key and reusing it multiple times.  So for non-interactive applications 
like email and PGP, RSA's easier.
- DH doesn't directly do signatures, and signatures are not only useful 
in themselves, but also you usually need signatures to trust the public 
key parts of DH key exchanges. (Yes, there are El-Gamal signatures.)
- PGP used RSA, mostly ignoring the RSA patents, which pushed RSA to put 
out a simplified library to retain some control over the process, and 
the controversy helped popularize RSA.  (That's the .5)