Brief History
Most cryptographic protocols rely on the prior establishment of secret or public keys or passwords. However, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol introduced the concept of two parties establishing a secure channel (that is, with at least some desirable security properties) without any such prior agreement. Unauthenticated Diffie-Hellman, as an anonymous key agreement protocol, has long been known to be subject to man in the middle attack. However, the dream of a "zipless" mutually authenticated secure channel remained.
The Interlock Protocol was described as a method to expose a middle-man who might try to compromise two parties that use anonymous key agreement to secure their conversation.
Read more about this topic: Interlock Protocol
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)