Computer Science | Grinnell College

In light of the recent announcement of Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman as the winners of the annual ACM Turing Award, we will be discussing their contribution to encryption. We'll also discuss the RSA encryption algorithm, which introduced asymmetric public key cryptography shortly after Diffie–Hellman. The "assigned" readings are the original academic papers on both subjects, which are surprisingly approachable for non-experts. Do your best to work through the technical details, and we'll spend much of the discussion Tuesday making sense of the rest, as well as the implications for this work. Printed copies of these two papers are on the bench outside Curtsinger's office.

• Whitfield Diffie, and Martin E. Hellman. "New directions in cryptography."Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on 22.6 (1976): 644-654.
• Ronald LRivest., Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman. "A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems." Communications of the ACM 21.2 (1978): 120-126.

Computer science table (CS Table) is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Tuesdays from 12:00-12:45 in JRC 224C. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to cover the cost of their meals. Visitors to the College and students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.

On Friday, 13 September 2013, the readings for CS Table will be two papers on trust.

The first is a classic paper, written as a Turing Award Speech

Ken Thompson. 1984. Reflections on trusting trust. Commun. ACM 27, 8 (August 1984), 761-763. DOI=10.1145/358198.358210 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/358198.358210

The second is a recent article from The New York Times

Nicole Perlroth, Jeff Larson, and Scott Shane. September 5, 2013. N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html

Computer science table is a weekly meeting of Grinnell College community members (students, faculty, staff, etc.) interested in discussing topics related to computing and computer science. CS Table meets Fridays at noon in the Day PDR. Contact Sam Rebelsky (rebelsky@grinnell.edu) for the weekly reading. Students on meal plans, faculty, and staff are expected to pay the cost of their meals. Students not on meal plans can charge their meals to the department.