LASCON 2014

When Whit Diffie, Ralph Merkle and I first started working in cryptography, people thought we were crazy. The fact that our invention of public key cryptography now protects literally trillions of dollars in financial transactions every day indicates that we should pay more attention to seemingly foolish ideas. Another historical lesson involves the role of outsiders in making key advances in cryptography. Finally, lessons I learned from my efforts to reduce the risk of a disaster involving nuclear weapons will be applied to that same goal in cryptography.