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Ralph Merkle

Ralph C. Merkle (born February 2, 1952) is a researcher in public key cryptography, and more recently a researcher and speaker on molecular nanotechnology and cryonics. Merkle appears in the science fiction novel The Diamond Age, involving nanotechnology.

[] Biography

Merkle graduated from Livermore High School in 1970 and proceeded to study Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, obtaining his B.A. in 1974, and his M.S. in 1977. In 1979, he received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, with a thesis entitled Secrecy, authentication and public key systems. He was a professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.^[1] Ralph Merkle is the grandnephew of baseball star Fred Merkle, the son of Theodore Charles Merkle, director of Project Pluto and the brother of Judith Merkle Riley, a historical writer.

Merkle is also a director of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, of Arizona. In industry, Ralph C. Merkle was the manager of compiler development at Elxsi from 1980. In 1988, he became a research scientist at Xerox PARC, until 1999. Subsequently he worked as a nanotechnology theorist for Zyvex, returning to academia in 2003 as a Distinguished Professor at Georgia Tech.^[1]

Merkle devised a scheme for communication over an insecure channel: Merkle's Puzzles. He co-invented the Merkle–Hellman knapsack cryptosystem, Merkle–Damgård construction, and invented Merkle trees. While at Xerox PARC, Merkle designed the Khufu and Khafre block ciphers, and the Snefru hash function.

Merkle is married to Carol Shaw the video game designer best known for her game, River Raid'^[2]

[] TV interviews

• Interview at Google Video (Adobe Flash video) in the Death in the Deep Freeze documentary (August 2, 2006)

[] Notes

[] References

• Ralph C. Merkle, Secrecy, authentication, and public key systems (Computer science), UMI Research Press, 1982, ISBN 0-8357-1384-9.
• Robert A. Freitas Jr., Ralph C. Merkle, Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines, Landes Bioscience, 2004, ISBN 1-57059-690-5.
• Paul Kantor (Ed), Gheorghe Muresan (Ed), Fred Roberts (Ed), Daniel Zeng (Ed), Frei-Yue Wang (Ed), Hsinchun Chen (Ed), Ralph Merkle (Ed), "Intelligence and Security Informatics" : IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, ISI 2005, Atlanta, GA, USA, May 19-20, ... (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), Springer, 2005, ISBN 3-540-25999-6.

[] External links

• Ralph Merkle's personal website
• First document describing public key cryptography
• Oral history interview with Martin Hellman Oral history interview 2004, Palo Alto, California. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Hellman describes his invention of public key cryptography with collaborators Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle at Stanford University in the mid-1970s. He also relates his subsequent work in cryptography with Steve Pohlig (the Pohlig-Hellman system) and others. Hellman addresses the National Security Agency’s (NSA) early efforts to contain and discourage academic work in the field, the Department of Commerce’s encryption export restrictions, and key escrow (the so-called Clipper chip). He also touches on the commercialization of cryptography with RSA Data Security and VeriSign.
• Merkle's Ph.D. thesis
• The First Ten Years of Public-Key Cryptography Whitfield Diffie, Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 76, no. 5, May 1988, pp: 560-577 (1.9MB PDF file)
• Who's Who in the Nanospace