Mathematicians at the National Security Agency and public key cryptography
Time and place
1 PM on Thursday, October 15th, 2009; NAC 6/113
Karen Thompson (National Security Agency)
Abstract
I will start with a brief history of NSA and talk about the varied things that mathematicians do there. I will talk a bit about the different kinds of mathematics that are important for solving our problems. I will give my background and experience over my now 24+ year career. Then I will talk about two different public key cryptography schemes, RSA and Diffie-Hellman, working through a basic example.
