Stephen C. Pohlig (1952/1953 inWashington, D.C. – April 14, 2017) was an American electrical engineer who worked in theMIT Lincoln Laboratory. As a graduate student ofMartin Hellman's atStanford University in the mid-1970s, he helped develop the underlying concepts ofDiffie-Hellman key exchange,[1] including thePohlig–Hellman exponentiation cipher and thePohlig–Hellman algorithm[2] for computingdiscrete logarithms. That cipher can be regarded as a predecessor to theRSA (cryptosystem) since all that is needed to transform it into RSA is to change the arithmetic from modulo a prime number to modulo a composite number.
In his spare time Stephen Pohlig was a keen kayaker known to many throughout the New England area.[citation needed]
Pohlig died on April 14, 2017, at the age of 64 after fighting gallbladder cancer for a year.[3]
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