Given the information that it was Ralph Merkle, that it was about his field (=cryptography), that it was intended to be a general overview (so about cryptography broadly construed and not a single result or breakthrough), aimed at outsiders (so little math), it was highly cited (more than most of his papers), and no co-author is mentioned (and you wouldn’t expect one for an ‘explainer’ like that), you should be able to make a good guess with a few seconds in Google Scholar after sorting his papers by citation-count and skimming the titles & summaries of each paper: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=10&q=author:%22ralph+merkle%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,21
My guess would be that it’s hit #8 on page 1, “Secure communications over insecure channels”, Merkle 1978, written in 1975 simultaneously with his breakthrough work on public-key crypto, which indeed would need to be explained to a lot of people at the time. It’s written in a very conversational tone, with historical background and discussion of practical issues and solutions like sending secret keys in the mail, extremely few equations or math (but imperative program pseudocode instead), published in a more general interest publication than the usual cryptography journals, and despite not presenting any new results & being ancient, is still apparently his 8th most cited paper ever out of 162 hits for him as author.
Which paper was Merkle talking about, if I may ask?
Given the information that it was Ralph Merkle, that it was about his field (=cryptography), that it was intended to be a general overview (so about cryptography broadly construed and not a single result or breakthrough), aimed at outsiders (so little math), it was highly cited (more than most of his papers), and no co-author is mentioned (and you wouldn’t expect one for an ‘explainer’ like that), you should be able to make a good guess with a few seconds in Google Scholar after sorting his papers by citation-count and skimming the titles & summaries of each paper: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=10&q=author:%22ralph+merkle%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,21
My guess would be that it’s hit #8 on page 1, “Secure communications over insecure channels”, Merkle 1978, written in 1975 simultaneously with his breakthrough work on public-key crypto, which indeed would need to be explained to a lot of people at the time. It’s written in a very conversational tone, with historical background and discussion of practical issues and solutions like sending secret keys in the mail, extremely few equations or math (but imperative program pseudocode instead), published in a more general interest publication than the usual cryptography journals, and despite not presenting any new results & being ancient, is still apparently his 8th most cited paper ever out of 162 hits for him as author.
I’m curious too. Anyone know which paper this is?