New Directions in Cryptography

New Directions in Cryptography (1976) is the paper by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman that introduced public-key cryptography to the open scientific literature and proposed the key-exchange protocol that would become the foundational mechanism for secure internet communication. Published in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, the paper demolished the classical assumption that secure communication requires prior shared secrecy, replacing it with a framework in which security emerges from computational asymmetry rather than pre-arrangement. The paper's title was not merely descriptive — it was programmatic. Diffie and Hellman understood that they were redirecting an entire field, and their framing of cryptography as a public science rather than a government monopoly set the political agenda for the cypherpunk and privacy movements that followed.