Description
Co-inventor of public key cryptography, Merkle is a researcher who also works as a speaker on molecular nanotechnology and cryonics. He appeared as a character in the science fiction novel *The Diamond Age*, involving nanotechnology. He devised a scheme for communication over an insecure channel: Merkle's Puzzles. Merkle co-invented the Merkle–Hellman knapsack cryptosystem and the Merkle–Damgård construction, and invented Merkle trees.
While at Xerox PARC, he designed the Khufu and Khafre block ciphers, and the Snefru hash function.
