Call Number: OH 376
Interviewee: Bidzos, James
Interviewer: Jeffrey R. Yost
Repository: Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Description: Transcript, 48 pp.
Abstract: James Bidzos begins by discussing his early career at IBM and as an international businessman in IT. He then moves on to describe how he came to take the helm of struggling software security firm RSA Data Security. He relates a number of early business challenges in financing and technology at this firm as it sought to commercialize encryption technology that extended from the research of MIT’s Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman—work that in turn built upon the invention of public key cryptography by Martin Hellman, Whitfield Diffie, and Ralph Merkle at Stanford University. In discussing how RSA developed into the leading software security firm, Bidzos describes the challenges posed by the government’s attempts to control the dissemination of encryption technology through export laws and other means. An important forum for debate on such issues (and later issues like the Clipper Chip) was the annual RSA Conference, a meeting that Bidzos initiated that included individuals from industry, government, and computer scientists, and evolved to become the leading annual event in the computer/software security field. Finally, Bidzos discusses the commercialization of encryption for authentication (signatures) by partnering with other major firms to found VeriSign.
Subject(s):
International Business Machines Corporation. ; Digital signatures. ; Data encryption (Computer science) -- Standards ; Cylink. ; Cryptographers’ Track at RSA Conference. ; Bidzos, James ; Microsoft Corporation. ; Public key cryptography. ; Public Key Partners. ; RSA Security. ; VeriSign.
Citation: James Bidzos, OH 376. Oral history interview by Jeffrey R. Yost, 11 December 2004, Mill Valley, California. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
Copyright: Copyright to this oral history is held by the Charles Babbage Institute. Distribution in any format of the transcript in its entirety is prohibited. Permission to quote from the transcript under the fair use provision of the copyright law (Title 17, U.S. Code) is granted provided that this source is cited.
Transcript: Link to transcript