Sam Wagstaff, Cryptanalysis of Diffie-Hellman and Pohlig-Hellman

We describe the Diffie-Hellman key-exchange protocol and the Pohlig-Hellman cipher. We discuss discrete logarithms and the cryptanalysis of these two systems. We also describe the Mental Poker protocol. About the speaker: Before coming to Purdue, Professor Wagstaff taught at the Universities of Rochester, Illinois, and Georgia. He spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His research interests are in the areas of cryptography, parallel computation, and analysis of algorithms, especially number theoretic algorithms. He and J. W. Smith of the University of Georgia have built a special processor with parallel capability for factoring large integers.