During the late ’60s, intelligence agencies were giving much thought to the fast-breaking developments in computers and wireless technologies, and to ways to protect government data that traveled over these channels. While encryption hardware was evolving, one crucial part of the process hadn’t changed since World War I: the need to distribute and use digital keys to scramble and unscramble messages. The process was a bottleneck. To ensure security, a unique key had to be generated for every pair of people who needed to conduct secret conversations; then those keys had to be delivered securely. Thousands of people were in the classified loop, and that meant generating millions of keys that needed to be protected. Managing the system was, to put it in a very un-British way, a bitch.~
Interesting piece from Wired on the shady origins of Public Key Encryption — still baffles me that it’s only 50 years old. (via)
