Turing Award Special: A Conversation with Martin Hellman

Summary

Episode Summary: Turing Award Special - A Conversation with Martin Hellman

Podcast Information:

• Title: Software Engineering Daily
• Host: Gregor Vand
• Guest: Martin Hellman, Turing Award Laureate
• Release Date: April 17, 2025

In this special Turing Award episode of Software Engineering Daily, host Gregor Vand engages in an insightful dialogue with Martin Hellman, a pivotal figure in the field of cryptography. Hellman, alongside Whitfield Diffie, revolutionized digital security through the invention of public key cryptography, a foundational technology for modern internet security. The conversation traverses Hellman's illustrious career, his contributions to nuclear risk policy, personal relationships, and reflections on emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.

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Early Career and the Birth of Public Key Cryptography

[01:22 - 04:00] Introduction and Beginnings Martin Hellman recounts his journey from an information theorist at Stanford in the late 1960s to the groundbreaking discovery of public key cryptography. Initially, Hellman's work had no direct ties to cryptography, but mentorship from influential figures like Horst Feistel and exposure to Claude Shannon's work catalyzed his foray into the field.

Notable Quote:

"I realized that I could actually do something because I was an information theorist and cryptography was a branch of information theory."
— Martin Hellman [02:54]

[04:00 - 07:07] Collaboration with Whitfield Diffie Hellman elaborates on his collaboration with Whitfield Diffie, which began in the fall of 1974 at IBM Yorktown Heights. Together, they explored the theoretical underpinnings of cryptography, leading to the development of the Diffie-Hellman-Merkle Key Exchange system.

Notable Quote:

"Meeting Whit was actually amazing because I was a bit of an odd duck... having somebody who was thinking the same way and didn't see me as crazy was a wonderful opportunity."
— Martin Hellman [04:27]

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Impact and Legacy of Public Key Cryptography

[07:07 - 12:46] Evolution and Adoption Hellman reflects on the unforeseen longevity and widespread impact of their work on public key cryptography. Initially anticipating a five to ten-year horizon for its revolution, Hellman discusses how it ultimately laid the groundwork for securing trillions of dollars daily in transactions worldwide.

Notable Quote:

"Today public key cryptography protects literally trillions of dollars a day."
— Martin Hellman [07:18]

[12:46 - 16:09] Post-Quantum Considerations Discussing future challenges, Hellman addresses the potential threats posed by quantum computing to current cryptographic methods. He emphasizes the necessity of transitioning to post-quantum cryptographic standards to safeguard future security.

Notable Quote:

"If quantum computing becomes a reality for 1,000-bit multi-thousand-bit keys, then yes, all the existing currently used public key methods would crumble."
— Martin Hellman [15:04]

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Government Relations and Academic Freedom

[18:58 - 23:10] Confronting Government Scrutiny Hellman shares an intriguing anecdote from October 1977, detailing how the NSA indirectly attempted to suppress his cryptographic publications. The IEEE's discreet handling of the situation and Stanford's legal counsel played pivotal roles in navigating the conflict.

Notable Quote:

"This is what I mean, that they were talking in code and they said, we're well aware of this law, but it's always been our position that we can't be the gatekeepers."
— Martin Hellman [18:58]

[23:01 - 24:11] Intellectual Property and Recognition Addressing claims from entities like GCHQ about pioneering public key cryptography, Hellman underscores the importance of open publication for recognition and commercial exploitation, irrespective of prior unpublicized developments.

Notable Quote:

"It's well established who gets credit. It's the first to publish openly, not the first to discover and keep secret."
— Martin Hellman [24:11]

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Transition to Nuclear Risk and Personal Relationships

[24:26 - 28:24] From Cryptography to International Security Hellman explains his shift from data security to international security, motivated by personal marital challenges. Collaborating with his wife, Dorothy, he delves into nuclear risk and advocates for a holistic approach to diplomacy and relationship-building.

Notable Quote:

"Humanity is like a 16-year-old boy with a new driver's license who somehow gets a high-powered sports car. We're either going to go up really fast or we're going to kill ourselves."
— Martin Hellman [28:24]

[28:24 - 35:54] Rethinking Diplomacy and Personal Growth Hellman discusses his perspectives on nuclear disarmament, emphasizing that it should be part of a broader, proactive strategy. Drawing parallels between personal relationships and international diplomacy, he advocates for empathy and mutual understanding to mitigate global threats.

Notable Quote:

"If we'd only ask and only try to put ourselves in another person's shoes, we would understand."
— Martin Hellman [28:24]

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Artificial Intelligence and Future Technologies

[35:18 - 33:50] Reflections on AI and its Governance While not directly involved in AI policy, Hellman shares concerns about the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and its governance. He warns against complacency, urging for proactive measures to ensure AI is harnessed responsibly.

Notable Quote:

"We're behaving like idiots and I count myself there 45 years ago, so it's not like to blame anybody."
— Martin Hellman [29:30]

[33:50 - 37:15] Personal Use and Perspectives on AI Tools Hellman candidly discusses his engagement with AI tools like ChatGPT, highlighting their utility in enhancing productivity. He acknowledges the rapid evolution of technology and the societal challenges it presents.

Notable Quote:

"Our brains developed when things didn't change for hundreds or thousands of years. Having things change so rapidly is what's the problem and why we're having trouble keeping up."
— Martin Hellman [33:34]

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Personal Relationships and Authorship

[37:15 - 40:46] Building and Sustaining Relationships Hellman transitions to discussing his personal life, particularly his enduring marriage with Dorothy. Together, they authored a book titled "True Love at Home and Peace on the Planet," intertwining lessons from their personal relationship with broader societal implications.

Notable Quote:

"If there were a Turing Award for relationships, Dorothy would win it."
— Martin Hellman [37:15]

[39:46 - 40:46] Insights from Their Book The conversation delves into the principles outlined in Hellman and Dorothy's book, such as the importance of being "very demanding" in relationships—not in the traditional sense of compromise, but in holding each other to high standards to foster mutual respect and understanding.

Notable Quote:

"Be very demanding... anything I demand of you, you have the absolute right to demand of me."
— Martin Hellman [39:59]

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Conclusion

In this multifaceted discussion, Martin Hellman not only recounts his monumental contributions to cryptography but also shares profound insights into international security and personal relationships. His holistic approach underscores the interconnectedness of technical innovation and human-centric principles, advocating for empathy, proactive governance, and personal growth as essential components for navigating both technological advancements and societal challenges.

Closing Quote:

"We need to grow up really fast. We need to grow up really fast."
— Martin Hellman [33:50]

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Note: This summary excludes advertisements, intros, and outros, focusing solely on the substantive content of the conversation.

Transcript

[Martin Hellman]

Martin Hellman is an American cryptographer known for co inventing public key cryptography with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkel in the 1970s. Their groundbreaking Diffie Hellman key exchange method allowed secure communication over insecure channels, laying the foundation for modern encryption protocols. Hellman has also contributed to cybersecurity policy and ethical discussions on nuclear risk. His work has had a lasting impact on cryptography, Internet security and global information protection. Martin received the 2015 Turing Award together with Whitville Diffie for inventing and promulgating both asymmetric public key cryptography, including its application to digital signatures and a practical cryptographic key exchange method. In this episode he joins Gregor Vand to talk about his life and career. Gregor Vand is a security focused technologist and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at Vand HK.

[Gregor Vand]

Hi Martin. Welcome to Software Engineering Daily.

[Martin Hellman]

Well, thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.

[Gregor Vand]

Yeah, it's great to have you here, Martin. This is an exciting opportunity for all of us to get to hear about the work that you have done spanning many decades. So today we've got Martin Hellman and we're going to be hearing all about cryptography, we're going to be talking about nuclear strategies and then we're also going to hear about Martin's book. So to go right back to the beginning though, I mean a lot of your life was all around public key cryptography. I would just love to start hearing where does this start in your life?

[Martin Hellman]

Well, it starts in 1966-68 when I was a graduate student at Stanford and I did my work in information theory, nothing to do with cryptography. I then worked at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights for a year and Horst Feistel, who many people will know was the father of their cryptographic effort, was department hired that same year as me. And while I didn't work in cryptography, I had lunch with Horst, got to know him and I saw IBM spending money. And then I taught at MIT for two years, 69 to 71 before coming back on the faculty here. And Peter Elias, who some people will recognize his name, he was chairman of the department, one of the original contributors to Information Theory, gave me a copy of Claude Shannon's 1949 paper Connecting Information Theory to Cryptography, which in hindsight makes absolute sense. And that's When I realized that I could actually do something because I was an information theorist and cryptography was a branch of information theory. So that's basically how it started.

[Gregor Vand]

So I believe you and Whitfield Diffie, you started collaborating. I mean, how did that even come about? And then sort of. What did that lead to?

[Martin Hellman]

Well, a lot of wonderful places. It started in, I think, the fall of 1974. I'd gone to IBM Yorktown Heights maybe four or five months earlier, and I met with Horst and some of the other people. IBM had its data encryption standard, which was the federal Standard for about 25 years, but a secrecy order had just descended on them. And they said they couldn't tell me very much. And I was talking about the need for theory of cryptography. And they were actually a little bit down because management had been telling them, I now know that they developed DES and what more was there to do? They tried to break it. They'd been unable, to wit. Difi came maybe a month or two after me and said roughly the same thing. They told him the same thing. But they added one additional point. When you get back to Stanford, because Whit had worked at the AI lab here at Stanford, look up Hellman. He was saying some similar stupid things. They didn't say that, but that was the implication. And so Whit looked me up in the fall of 1974 when he got back here, and that began a great collaboration for about two years.

[Gregor Vand]

And, I mean, I think sort of just setting the scene here, when we're talking about cryptography, I think a lot of the listener base will kind of understand today what cryptography does for them. But back in 1974, I believe you just said, you've mentioned in your writing, you said, muse of fools sometimes whispers in your ear, leading to occasional home runs. So I think what's interesting here is at the time, this sounded like something where people, I think, were even telling you, don't do this.

[Martin Hellman]

All my colleagues, that's not an exaggeration, told me I was crazy to work in cryptography. I now say that's the best thing they could have told me, because I've talked to six Nobel laureates and asked them if the work that won them their Nobel Prizes had initially been encouraged or discouraged as foolish crazy never go anywhere. And at least five out of the six said, foolish crazy never go anywhere. One of them, Lewin Yarrow, who I just met about a year and a half ago, said he won the Nobel Prize in physiology or Medicine in 1998. He told me that the dean of his medical school came to him and said, lou, we hired you because you did good work. Why are you doing this crazy stuff on nitric oxide? Crazy stuff that won him the Nobel Prize. So, yeah, people did say it was crazy. And meeting wit was actually amazing that way because I'm a bit of an odd duck and I think the best work is done in opposition to conventional wisdom, which I call conventional foolishness sometimes. But meeting wit was wonderful because I was getting tired of working in a vacuum and having somebody who was thinking the same way and didn't see me as crazy was a wonderful opportunity.

[Gregor Vand]

So I guess that's it. By meeting someone else who. The meeting of the minds, that's sort of what gave you the, I guess, energy to continue.

[Martin Hellman]

I think I might have anyway. But certainly having wit helped. And then Ralph Merkel came into our life, who many people don't know of, but many people in cybersecurity will know of. Merkle Trees. This is the same Ralph Merkle. He was an undergraduate and later a master's student at Berkeley, and he came up with half of Public Key Cryptography all on his own, independently of us and a little before us, actually. And what's now called Diffie Hellman Key Exchange. I prefer to call Diffie Hellman Merkle Key Exchange because it's actually a Merkle system. There's a slight difference between what Diffie and I came up with at Stanford and what Ralph came up with at Berkeley. And then I kidnapped him. He did his PhD under my supervision. I mean, he really did it largely on his own here at Stanford. I mean, we did collaborate. But anyway, so you asked about Public Key Cryptography. So Whit and I met in fall of 74. The data encryption Standard was announced in the Federal Register in March 75. And right around then we'd been talking about some things. But Whit was the first to really enunciate the idea of a public key crypto system. Although in hindsight, it grew out of things that we'd been talking about. And then we were trying to find that. And it was a night in May 1976. I was sitting at. I'm pretty sure it's the same desk where I'm sitting now. And it was probably 1:00 in the morning, no students, no kids, no wife to interrupt me. And I was just playing and I came up with what's now called Diffie Hellman Key Exchange, but it was actually a Merkle system. I was trying to come up with a Diffie Hellman System, a public key crypto system, but it was actually a Merkle public key distribution system.

[Gregor Vand]

Where did you think that this was going to be used? I mean, we can obviously get onto the fact that it becomes effectively the modern Internet. But yeah, when you were working on it, what was your thoughts of where this was going to be used? I guess.

[Martin Hellman]

Oh. So Whit and I were about 20 years ahead of our time. We thought we were only about five years ahead of our time, but it turned out to be about 20. Just like woolen Yarrow when I talked about his work. And the first paragraph, the first sentence, in fact, of our paper New Directions in cryptography, published in November 1976, starts out, we stand today on the brink of a revolution in cryptography. And Whit and I thought that revolution would occur within five, at most 10 years. It actually took about 20 with the Internet to really take place. And today public key cryptography protects literally trillions of dollars a day. When someone told me this, I thought I said, you're wrong. You mean trillions of dollars a year? And he said, no, I mean trillions of dollars a day. And it turns out foreign exchange alone is over US$7 trillion per day. That's US$7 million million US dollars per day. Because Europeans use trillions differently from Americans.

[Gregor Vand]

And I think just, I mean, again, just for our listener base, we have quite a spectrum, ages and experience, just sort of in layman terms, as you call out, it protects trillions per day. What is being protected of the average user?

[Martin Hellman]

Good question. So when I give a talk to a general audience, I often ask, how many of you have used cryptography? And usually nobody raises their hand. And then I say, how many of you have bought something on the Internet? Everybody raises their hand. How many of you have done electronic banking? Again, everybody raises their hand. And I point out they've used public key cryptography. They just didn't know it because it was integrated, automatic and transparent, as it should be. So the user doesn't have to do something special to get security, because if he or she does, they typically won't. And so that's a good example of a piddling transaction. Maybe tens of dollars, hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars compared to the foreign exchange, which is trillions of dollars a day.

[Gregor Vand]

Yeah, I think that's a very good example. I mean, exactly. Buying anything online or doing any kind of transaction, public key cryptography comes into it.

[Martin Hellman]

So one thing I can do is I can explain how Diffie Hellman or Diffie Hellman Merkel Key Exchange works at least I can give a plausibility argument. Let's say you and I want to exchange for physical messages instead of electronic messages. And we have a third party, maybe my wife, sitting in between us. You're here sitting near me, but I have to hand all the messages to my wife, to you. And I don't want her to read them because maybe we're planning a surprise birthday party for her. So what I do is I walk up my message in a strong box with a combination to which only I know the combination. I'd like to tell you the combination, but if I tell you, I also tell my wife, and she could open it when she gets it. So when she gets it, she can't open it. When you get it, you can't open it. But I've made the hasp on the lock big enough to put two locks. You then add your lock to which only you know the combination. You pass it back to Dorothy, my wife. She can't take off either lock. When I get it, what can I do? I take off my lock, leaving only your lock. I then pass it back to Dorothy. She still can't open it. When you get it, you. You can open it and take out the message and read it. And this is roughly how Diffie Hellman Merkel Key Exchange works. And it's important that it's commutative. If I'd only made the hasp big enough for one lock, when you got my strongbox, you might have put it in the biggest strongbox and put your lock on the outside. But when I got it, I couldn't get inside to take off my lock. It has to be commutative. And the function that we used or that I use in Diffie Hellman Key Exchange, which is exponentiation and modular arithmetic, is commutative. It doesn't matter which order you do the operations in, just like it doesn't matter which order you put the locks on.

[Gregor Vand]

Yeah, I mean, this is obviously fascinating. And back then, how do you go about actually sort of proving this, so to speak?

[Martin Hellman]

Well, we can't prove it, and no one can prove it today either. The only thing is, it's been around for almost 50 years, which shocks me. I mean, I'm getting old. I'm 79 years old. And this year will be 49 years. Next year will be the 50th anniversary of the publication of that paper and of the coming up with Diffie Hellman Merkel Key Exchange. It's interesting. This month, February, used to be Black History Month until President Trump got Rid of it. So I'm going to tell you that John Gill, who was one of the first black graduates of Georgia Tech, was the one who suggested exponentiation and modular arithmetic to me. He's a colleague of mine here at Stanford.

[Gregor Vand]

Awesome. That's a really great tribute. Thank you for calling that one out.

[Martin Hellman]

Oh, and he's one of the unsung heroes of public key cryptography, along with Ralph Merkel is somewhat sung, but not enough. Richard Tropell's another Steve Pollig. There are a number of names I could go into.

[Gregor Vand]

Yeah, I think this is exactly when the phrase standing on the shoulders of giants. I mean, I don't think people of certainly my generation realize just quite how much we don't know and what we're standing on top of to make anything possible.

[Martin Hellman]

And whenever a prize is given, like the Turing Award was given, to wit, and me, there are a lot of people who contributed to it. Ralph Merkel might have been included, but wasn't because he didn't have the authentication part of public key cryptography, which is used in my smartphone and your smartphone when I have an Apple iPhone. When Apple sends a software update to the phone, how does the phone know that it's from Apple and not from some malevolent person trying to plant malware on the phone? What they do is Apple signs the software update using a secret key that only they know. My phone has a public key in it. So even if someone takes the phone apart, they can't sign new messages and yet it uses the public key to verify the software update. Ralph did not have that part, but he did have the privacy part of public key cryptography independently of us, in a slightly different way from us and even a little bit before us.

[Gregor Vand]

We're going to go back a bit in a second, but just when you mentioned smartphone and what that sort of can enable, have you guys have had any, I guess, inputs or thoughts around passkeys and webauthn and that kind of technology? Yeah. What comes to mind now when. When we think about that?

[Martin Hellman]

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that banks are training us to fall for fishing expeditions. I have accounts at several financial institutions and all of them send me emails saying click here to open your statement. Well, how do I know that email is from the bank, the financial institution, and not from some malevolent person impersonating the bank? I always go to a bookmark, which is what people should do. So there are some very simple things we could do. But about 45 years ago, IEEE Spectrum which is the main magazine of the IEEE, which is the main electrical engineering professional society, called me and asked me what was the greatest unsolved problem in cryptography. And I said lack of user awareness. And it's still true today.

[Gregor Vand]

Yeah. And I think that's where passkeys, using a private key that's stored on your device, that's where we're able to advance security. Luckily for the users, in theory, we're making it easier for users by implementing that standard, but it still seems to be taking a while.

[Martin Hellman]

Well, and the other thing is they finally got smart. I've been saying again for about almost 50 years that you should have a separate part of a phone or a computer that is used only for information that no one should ever see. Like when a bank is verifying your password, they shouldn't be able to see what your password is. They should just be able to ask a question. Is this the correct password for. For Martin Hellman. And it gets a yes or no. And we now have enclaves in smartphones that allow that.

[Gregor Vand]

Exactly. Yeah. We've had a few episodes on sort of different aspects of passkeys WebAuthn. We also spoke to a company who is using AWS enclaves, which are sort of exactly for that purpose as well, from a cloud perspective. So moving I guess into the very present day and the future quantum computing. And just spoken to some very smart folks over at Meta, which is another episode that will have have either come out before this one or post about post quantum cryptography. Is this something that falls into anything that you're looking at today? Or how did you even consider this when you were doing your work, the advancement of computing power and so on?

[Martin Hellman]

Well, the advancement of computing power was very much in our minds. Quantum computing didn't come about until about 1990, the concept of it. And we were doing our work 15 years before that almost. And my simple answer with quantum computing. I'm not an expert in it, but I do know people who are. It'll be at least 10 years before we know whether or not there's a risk to current public key methods from quantum computing. It'll be probably at least another 10 before that risk manifests itself, if it ever does now. But this doesn't mean that we can neglect the problem right now because your medical records should still be secret 20 years from now. I'm likely to be dead. I'm 79. But a young person's medical records and even mine should still be secret 20, 30 years from now. But. And so there's a concept harvest now, decrypt later, which you've probably heard, where you suck up lots of information, store it and hope to decrypt it 20 years in the future. So we need to be concerned about this even now.

[Gregor Vand]

Yeah, I mean, how would you. Does the mechanism that you came up with, does that need to be modified? Or is this something else that we need to be looking at?

[Martin Hellman]

If quantum computing becomes a reality for 1,000bit multi thousand bit keys, then yes, all the existing currently used public key methods would crumble. And so the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States nist, has a post quantum competition to come up with cryptographic standards and they've issued some. And this is very important, not just for quantum cryptography, but also because of the other advances that might occur. You talked about computing speed, which is continuing to increase, although not as fast as it was in the 70s. But there's another problem. There's advances in cryptanalysis. And here I've used an analogy that I first came up with for nuclear issues. People point to the roughly 80 years since the use of nuclear weapons and say there's nothing to worry about. Well, what I point out is if you toss a coin 80 times in a row and get tails every time, no nuclear war after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was an unusual situation because we had a monopoly to 95% confidence, you can only project about a third of the time into the future, about 25, 30 years into the future. And is 95% confidence good enough? You could project 80 years into the future, but only if you're willing to be about 50% confident. And what I've argued for cryptanalysis is we've had major advances in factoring and discrete logarithms, which could break both RSA and Diffie Hellman key exchange in 1970, 1980 and 1990, but there hasn't been anything major since. And so if you think of each decade as tossing a coin, we got heads in 1970, heads in 1980, heads in 1990, tails in 2000, tails in 2010, tails in 2020, and well, I could have a tails in 2030, but if you toss the coin, I think that's seven times I'd have to check. And you got three heads followed by four tails. Would you dare predict tails into the indefinite future? I don't think so. And so we need to be planning for that as well.

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[Gregor Vand]

So we're going to go to Probabilistic Risk on the nuclear side in just a second. I just wanted to wrap up on the sort of the cryptography and the history. There was a little, I believe, interesting anecdote around, sort of from the government standpoint and sort of you. I mean, there's two interesting anecdotes here. I think one was around the fact that the students at Stanford that you were supervising, they didn't actually want to be. They couldn't be shown on the paper or.

[Martin Hellman]

Okay, I can tell you that it was October 1977. It was an information theory symposium at Cornell University. And Steve Pollig, Ralph Merkel and I had two papers, one with each student. Whit and I had already published ours. And a member of the IEEE who lived in Maryland wrote from his home address to the IEEE saying he was concerned that the IEEE was breaking the law by publishing certain papers. And he never mentioned me by name, but he listed a sequence of IEEE publications. And I had a paper in every single one, except maybe one of them. And it turns out this guy worked at nsa. So there's a joke that NSA doesn't stand for the National Security Agency. It stands for no such agency and never say anything. The IEEE wrote back, also in code. People start to talk in code when they get into cryptography. And they sent a copy of their response to me and his letter. They sent it to me as being on the board of governors of the IEEE Information Theory Group, which was publishing most of these papers. They didn't send it to me as Martin Hellman, troublemaker. They didn't send it to the other members of the board of governors. So this is what I mean, that they were talking in code and they said, we're well aware of this law, but it's always been our position that we can't be the gatekeepers. It's up to the authors and their institutions to make sure they're not violating the law. And so I had been unaware of it. I took it to Stanford's general counsel. He told me that he was convinced that if the law was interpreted broadly enough to cover our publications, it was unconstitutional. It infringed on freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But he also warned me, and I'll never forget this, that they couldn't go to jail for me if I was convicted. And he also suggested that the two papers that the students were supposed to deliver end Cornell in October 77 should be delivered by me because it was questionable whether the university could defend the students. And also I was a tenured professor. My career could withstand a multi year court case, whereas a newly minted PhD might have problems. So I went to the students, Steve Pollog and Ralph Merkel, and I told them, look, I'm happy to give the papers, but if you want to give them, that's also okay, but I have to warn you. And I told them all the stuff. The students bravely said, no, we'll give the papers. A week later, both of them came back to me at slightly different times and said, my mother's beating on me. My mother was also worried, although I think by that time, no, she was still alive at that point. So they said, please give the papers for us. So when the time came for those two papers, I went up with the student. This was prearranged. And I said, normally the student would be giving this paper, but on the advice of Stanford's legal counsel, and everyone knew what was going on, I'm going to give the paper. I want you to consider the words coming from my mouth as if they're coming from his mouth in every sense except legally. And the students got more attention that way than they would have if they'd given the paper. So it worked out very well.

[Gregor Vand]

That's amazing. And obviously NSA didn't pursue this any.

[Martin Hellman]

Way or no, but Phil Zimmerman, who had public key, pretty good privacy, pgp, did have to get an attorney a few years later. And the interesting thing is Admiral Inman, who is the director of NSA at the time, and maybe more than loosely speaking, they wanted to throw me in jail for publishing my papers because I was exporting technical data on implements of war. Anything cryptographic is defined as an implement of war in that law. And I was exporting technical data by publishing in international journals. And the good News is about 10 years ago, Inman was interviewed by one of Dan Bona's students, who's a colleague of mine here, largely replaced me. He's that the cryptography person in CS at Stanford now. And the student who then became a professor at MIT asked Inman whether he'd still, with what he now knows, he'd still try to suppress my work. And he said quite the opposite. With the Chinese stealing American commercial secrets that have strong national security implications, he would try to get it out as quickly as possible.

[Gregor Vand]

Yeah, fascinating. And there was also something to do with gchq, which is the uk, CIA.

[Martin Hellman]

If you want to say nsa. Yes.

[Gregor Vand]

Oh, yeah, sorry, the uk nsa. Yes. People might know it from James Bond, the sort of building up on the screen, but they almost sort of claimed that they had come up with PKE first or something.

[Martin Hellman]

Public key cryptography. Yeah. So let's see. I was a little disturbed when that first came out in the 1990s, when one of my colleagues, who should have known better, said for the true story of the Invention of Public Key Cryptography, read this paper. And it was a paper by someone from GCHQ arguing that they had come up with the concept first, which they. They may have, they probably did. But one of the two arguments that my colleagues made early on was if I did anything good, NSA or gchq, they didn't say GCHQ would classify it. And my attitude was it doesn't matter what they know, it's not available for commercial exploitation. And there was a commercial need that was growing, which actually didn't come about till the Internet. So I don't care if I just reconstruct everything they already know. And also it's well established who gets credit. It's the first to publish openly, not the first to discover and keep secret. And so I was a little concerned with this. But the good news is there's plenty of credit to go around and so it's not an issue.

[Gregor Vand]

That's wonderful. We're going to move to probabilistic risk on the nuclear side. And I mean, the first question really is, how did you kind of end up transferring from looking at cryptography to looking at nuclear risk?

[Martin Hellman]

Yeah, how did I go from data security to international security is the way I usually put it.

[Gregor Vand]

Yeah, yeah.

[Martin Hellman]

The waypoint was marital security. My wife was ready to leave me 45 years ago. I didn't know this. We've been married almost 58 years now. Life with me was no joy. Life with her wasn't a picnic either. And fortunately she decided rather than leaving me, she was going to get it right. She didn't know how to do that, but she experimented continually. She's really brilliant. And she found an organization which we had actually made fun of up to that point, but that worked on the interpersonal, which is what first got us interested, and the international at the same time. And the two really go together. And our book, which we'll talk about, has us a subtitle, creating True Love at Home and Peace on the Planet. And the thing that connects them is the sound bite in the book, Get Curious, Not Furious. So when Dorothy used to do things that seemed crazy to me, I used to treat her like she was crazy, which drove her crazy, which convinced me I was right, she was crazy and kept the whole cycle going. And we do the same internationally. You know, Russia is doing these crazy things, China's doing these crazy things, or from their perspective, we're doing these crazy things. And if we'd only ask and only try to put ourselves in another person's shoes, we would understand. So that was how I got into these issues, was through this organization. And I actually took a year and a half leave without pay from Stanford to work as a full time volunteer. I as either very sane or very.

[Gregor Vand]

Crazy, depending on your perspective around nuclear security. I think you proposed something along the lines of if we're continuing to push for disarmament, that that's actually the wrong strategy. Have I been understanding that correctly?

[Martin Hellman]

It's not the first step. I have a draft paper, or maybe it'll be an op ed called Rethinking Diplomacy, which argues that nuclear disarmament, which is where the few people working on this issue, most of them tend to concentrate, is okay to talk about, but it's only okay to talk about as part of a process which has to start with much, much earlier. So, for example, I was just reading Arms Control today, which is put out by the Arms Control association, and I went into my wife a few hours ago and I said, this is crazy. They're talking about the need for arms control, which is correct. But how can we have arms control with the Russians when we're giving weapons to Ukraine to kill Russians? And what we need to find is ways to celebrate the Ukrainian identity and the Russian identity. It's kind of like in Israel. I'm Jewish and I used to be an APAC type of Jew, you know, which nobody could criticize Israel because it was my get out of concentration camp free card. I had been born 10-45- right after World War II. We'd lost some relatives in the Holocaust and I knew about the United States turning away a boatload of Jews in 1939, sending them back to Germany where many perished in the concentration camps. And, and it was 1981 when I finally realized that that was an old five year old. I had formulated that opinion when I was five years old. And there were much bigger risks to my physical existence than resurgent Nazism in the United States, which by the way, might happen. I mean, the way things are going right now. And among them was the risk of a nuclear war, which is horrendous. And it's something that people are overlooking. But by the way it's not just nuclear weapons. What I've said is that nuclear weapons, climate change, artificial intellig are not the real problems. They're symptoms of a deeper underlying problem, which is the chasm between the godlike physical power that technology has given human beings and our at best irresponsible adolescent behavior as a species, not individually. And so I make the analogy that humanity is like a 16 year old boy with a new driver's license who somehow gets a high powered sports car. We're either going to go up really fast or we're going to kill ourselves. And I'm working to try to help us grow up really fast. In which case the nuclear threat, the threat of climate change, all those would become opportunities to finally work more cooperatively. Beating swords into plowshares is no longer just a morally desirable opportunity, it's a necessity for human survival. And most people don't realize that.

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[Gregor Vand]

That nuclear policy and maybe I'd love to also get your thoughts on AI policy, despite I don't think you've worked on it in any sort of particular sense. But this sort of relies on subjective expert opinion rather than sort of quantitative risk analysis which could you maybe just speak a bit to that? Because I can imagine from the nuclear side that's maybe how people looked at it originally, which was sort of how do we crunch this down to numbers? And you're saying actually it's simple, we're.

[Martin Hellman]

Behaving like idiots and I count myself there 45 years ago, so it's not like to blame anybody. We are neglecting major risks at our peril. The nuclear risk, the climate change risk, AI and saying that we only want to use AI for good, which many people say is ridiculous when we're building it into weapon systems.

[Gregor Vand]

Right. What kind of, I guess, parallels do you see with AI or what are your thoughts around AI governance and all that kind of thing?

[Martin Hellman]

Well, we're going to have to grow up and we're going to have to rethink diplomacy. So in this paper or op ed on rethinking diplomacy, I argue that the reason diplomacy has been so ineffective is we've based it on wishful thinking too often. Occasionally we base it on reality and then we make great strides. Like the number of nuclear weapons in the world today is less than 20% of what it was at the peak of the arms race. That's because we use diplomacy effectively. And yet we say that diplomacy with North Korea is our goal. And yet it has to be about denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, which is code words for unilateral nuclear disarmament on their part. So denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula sounds good and it would be nice if they unilaterally nuclear disarm with their nuclear weapons, but they're not going to do that. They don't have a death wish. So we need to base diplomacy in reality, and we have not done that far too often. We don't put ourselves in the other guy's shoes. And by the way, again, I fought myself for this, not now, but 45 years ago, because my wife and I didn't use diplomacy in settling our fights. We haven't had a fight in probably 20 years, which was beyond my comprehension. And I give Dorothy the credit for that vision. And actually, she needed it more than just the vision.

[Gregor Vand]

And we're going to get onto your relationship with your wife and the book just shortly. I'd love to just stick on AI for just a second. I think it's always just fascinating to get different people's thoughts on where AI is today and in the future. But I'm going to ask a more simple question, which is, do you use any of the AI tools today? Because I'm always just curious how people are interacting with it. And I think someone with your history and career, I'm just curious how you do or don't use it today.

[Martin Hellman]

I don't use it as much as I should. One of my colleagues, a Nobel laureate, says that he's at least 50% smarter from using ChatGPT. And I've started to use it. Like I had a Danish news magazine article that I wanted to translate and I tried using Google Translate to do it and it was doing an okay job, but not great. I put it into ChatGPT and it did a wonderful piece. This was, by the way, something I found in rt. It used to be Russia Today. It claimed that there was a Danish harbor master who saw blips on his Radar screen just before the destruction, the sabotage of Nord Stream pipeline and the transponders were off. He thought they might be in distress. So he went out and it turned out to be American naval vessels. He was told by the Danish navy to keep quiet about it, which he stopped doing. And I wanted to find this out because I wanted to see the Danish article, but I don't speak Danish, but I do have a friend in Copenhagen and so I sent him a request. He sent me the Danish article and I ran it through ChatGPT. So it's excellent. And I have to use Orn to use it more.

[Gregor Vand]

Yeah, exactly. I think all of these tools, they all have their. The pros and cons, I guess, or. I've noticed that Claude seems to come up a lot as the one that humans the most kind of engaging, whereas I as a programmer use GPT more. But it's kind of interesting. Great to hear how you're thinking about it.

[Martin Hellman]

The same friend, the Nobel Laureate, says that he can program 50% more using ChatGPT to help him with the writing programs.

[Gregor Vand]

Yeah, absolutely. There's what's called an ide. So what people write code within. There's one called Cursor that I'm sure a lot of listeners, they've heard of it and they probably have an opinion. Usually sort of very pro or don't quite get it, but it's changed, certainly my relationship to coding and a lot of my other programming friends, they basically analogize Cursor to having a junior developer without having to pay that junior developer, which I completely agree with, which I think is very interesting for coding and just sort of any career in engineering goes from here, which I find pretty fascinating.

[Martin Hellman]

In Fiddle on the Roof, Tevye, the main character, says to his wife at one point, it's a strange new world, Goldie.

[Gregor Vand]

Yes, well, it is, it is. And it's happened in the sake of two years. Basically, as you know, is where we've come from.

[Martin Hellman]

Which explains, by the way, why human beings have trouble catching up. Our brains developed when things didn't change for hundreds or thousands of years. And having things change so rapidly is what's the problem and why we're having trouble keeping up. But we need to catch up. We need to grow up really fast.

[Gregor Vand]

Yeah, I think that's a really good theme, I guess, to everything that we've talked about so far today. And I guess just then moving to the book that you've written with your wife, and this is kind of, I guess, the sort of just to use A stock phrase book, sort of culmination of your life's work, I guess into this book almost. Could you speak a bit to the book and why the book? And when I was preparing for this interview, I was like, oh, we've got cryptography, we've got nuclear, then we've got relationships. So all to me at the beginning seemed a bit different, but obviously there's quite a clear thread, I think through all of it.

[Martin Hellman]

Well, first of all, and you can put this up on the website, there's a link for people can download a free copy of the PDF of the whole book. So that's easily done. Why the book? About 10 years ago, I realized that Dorothy and I got involved with Creative Initiative, the group that became Beyond War. And this is talked about in the book. And it also has stories about cryptography. Admiral Inman, nsa. You can search on those terms in the PDF. And the thing that got us involved was wanting to improve our personal relationship, our marriage, not wanting to make the world a better place. Except as we got involved we wanted to do both. And everyone we knew who was involved initially came with that motivation. So I said we need to write a book about that connects the two, but it's more about personal relationships. And so Dorothy agreed that we should do this. And we haven't had a. By the way, that book was written nine, 10 years ago. And so we didn't have a fight while writing the book either, because we haven't had a fight in about 20 years. And again, I give Dorothy credit for that. So what was the other question?

[Gregor Vand]

What is that thread? I guess between your work on cryptography, your work on nuclear, and then how has that translated into what this book is about, which is, I mean, it's relationships.

[Martin Hellman]

Yeah, well, the dust cover of the hardcover, which people might have trouble getting, said that Martin's research on encryption was originally seen as a fool's errand, but it recently won him the ACM's million dollar Turing Award, often regarded as the Nobel Prize in Computing. Following Dorothy down an uncharted path until they reclaimed the true love that they felt when they first met. While also seemed like a fool's errand, but it proved even more rewarding. Even a million dollars doesn't buy true love.

[Gregor Vand]

There we go. See, this theme of growing up quickly, I guess, would you sort of say that that also applies, I guess, to relationships, the way you see them?

[Martin Hellman]

Absolutely, yeah. So when we used to fight, I used to behave like a two year old sometimes. That tells you something. I wasn't grown up. I need to become a mature adult in our relationship. I also gave a talk. A colleague of mine here at Stanford invited me to talk to his class. And one of the things I pointed out is that when a husband and wife fight, we're breaking our marriage vows. We don't realize it because it's so common, but we say in the marriage ceremony, I will love this person through good times and bad. Well, here it is, a hard time, a bad time. And I'm fighting with her, I'm yelling at her, I'm mistreating her. And a couple of nights later, we were at this fellow's house and he was dancing with his wife. And he told me he wouldn't be dancing with his wife if I hadn't given that talk because he realized he was breaking his marriage vows by fighting with her. They'd had a big argument.

[Gregor Vand]

Yeah. So, yeah, I think that's a poignant tale, I guess. But also, just looking back through what you've done in life, I think this sort of idea around relationships and growing up fast, and I think probably for most people listening today, if they're thinking about something today that maybe isn't their romantic relationship, but is something that they're trying to about from a technology perspective, it probably is the AI. What is their relationship to AI. And I think we're struggling to grow up fast enough with what's happening there.

[Martin Hellman]

We need to. And by the way, I've often said that if there were a Turing Award for relationships, Dorothy would win it. I feel like lightning has struck twice in my life. I mean, winning the Turing Award was more than I ever thought of. And then also marrying Dorothy, which almost didn't work out. We were on the verge of divorce 45 years ago, and we've had to piece the marriage back together as a process, just like it's going to be a process to rethink diplomacy to solve the nuclear threat. And if we do that, I'm convinced we can beat swords into plowshares, and I'm a fool. So. By the way, there's an interesting story there that's in the book. About 35 years ago, Dorothy's reading, doing tarot cards, and I said to her, we don't believe in fortune telling cards. Why are you doing that? And she said, well, I picked up through society that it wasn't of the church, and therefore it must be of the devil. And I was afraid of it. And I decided if I was going to be afraid of it, I should first know what it was. Which I admire in her. And so she had bought a deck of Tarot cards and was doing readings. And she said, would you like me to do your reading? I said, sure, let's see what the silly cards show. And so she did my reading, and I end up the fool. And I was not happy. I remember this is 35 years ago. I didn't say, but I was thinking, I'm a world famous Stanford professor. I hadn't yet won the Turing Award, but that's in the offing. And then Dorothy shows me the positive qualities of the fulguration, which is a lot of what Tarot's about. He goes where no one else goes. And as soon as she said that, I realized that my professional success and my marital success, our marital success, has been largely a function of my being willing to undertake experiments that everyone else thought was crazy. Like, there's a section in the book, be very demanding. So Dorothy's at her hairdresser's again about 35 years ago, and the hairdresser says, you seem to have a good marriage. What advice would you give me? And Dorothy says, the words that came tumbling out of my mouth made no sense to me. Be very demanding. Because she thought of marriage as compromise. But then she thought about it and she realized that if we compromised, neither of us got what we wanted, and each of us built up resentment. And it was important to be most demanding of herself or me of myself. And so that's another difference. Usually we think of being very demanding as, you'd better give me this instead of, I'd better do that. And in our case, where we both had committed to do the right thing for the relationship, Dorothy could demand things of me, but she also told me, anything I demand of you, you have the absolute right to demand of me. Which transformed many of her requests, many of her demands, from seemingly crazy ones into brilliant ones. I said, wait a minute, I can ask for that, too. That sounds pretty good.

[Gregor Vand]

Yeah, I think that's great. I can probably attest to that with my wife as well. That's probably something that we actually practice as well. And I think anyone listening today, again, you can apply these principles, relationships, even with, I don't know, your engineering manager, this kind of thing.

[Martin Hellman]

Oh, in the workplace, it's many places. But the problem is society has given us rules for making relationships work which don't work. And you can see that from the 50% divorce rate in the United States and many other countries as well. How many people would say, be very demanding when asked for advice on a relationship.

[Gregor Vand]

Right. Well, Martin, it's been such a pleasure to have you come join us today. And we've got to hear about, obviously, the history of public key cryptography, nuclear policy and relationships in general, which I think is always just a fascinating topic and something I think a lot of our listeners can relate to. And maybe listening today, this has been a nice little segue in their day for them away from just pure technical things. I think it's always healthy to hear some new perspectives. So sincerely appreciate you coming on and giving the time today from your base in Stanford.

[Martin Hellman]

Well, thank you very much. And thanks for your questions. They were very.