Turing Award Winner: NSA, Public Key Cryptography, Crypto Wars | Martin Hellman

Turing Award Winner: NSA, Public Key Cryptography, Crypto Wars | Martin Hellman

From The Peterman Pod by Ryan Peterman

July 6, 2026 · 1h 2m

About this episode

Ryan Peterman interviews Turing Award winner Martin Hellman about his groundbreaking work in public-key cryptography and its implications.

Martin Hellman is a Turing Award winner who helped to invent public-key cryptography against the NSA's wishes. I interviewed him all about his work and why it broke the law at the time. • My ergonomic keyboard project I mentioned, you can follow along here: https://read.compose.llc/ • The Kickstarter page for it: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done Podcast links: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/AZLOETBCQM4 • Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835 • Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/turing-award-winner-nsa-public-key Thank you to this episode's sponsor for supporting my work: • WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at https://workos.com/ Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (00:34) Why his work broke the law (08:39) How people did encryption before (18:51) The crypto wars (26:22) The story behind Diffie Hellman key exchange (36:48) Signatures vs key exchange (43:05) RSA patent wars (48:08) Why inventions happen at similar times (50:29) What he worked on after cryptography (57:31) His thoughts on…

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