If you read the footnotes he states that he was tempted to include those, but then there would be problematic to separate what algorithms would fit his text, so he decided against including any.
Why? RSA is one of the greatest breakthroughs of the last half century in my opinion.
It was the first implementation of an asymmetric crypto scheme. Merkle came up with the idea of public key cryptography, but he never provided a mathematical technique to achieve that.
Imagine a world where RSA was never invented. We would not be able to exchange secrets over an insecure channel, so naturally, HTTPS/TLS would never have existed - this alone is huge. We would not be able to exchange secure email in a scalable way (PGP). We not be able to securely sign messages for authentication. And there's a ton more. This is without counting the schemes and techniques designed on top of RSA!
There exist other asymmetric encryption schemes; indeed there exists one that is basically non interactive Diffie Hellman key exchange, and DH was discovered before RSA was.
I was under the impression that RSA was first, but I guess I was wrong.
DH is a key exchange algorithm, not a general public-key encryption algorithm. So, as far as I understand, TLS would work, but the others I listed would not.
RSA was the first PKE scheme, but El Gamal, another PKE, is essentially a small modification of DH. Elgamal was discovered in 1985; before encryption really hit the mainstream.
I see. I'm not too familiar with crypto, so thanks for explaining. I guess that the argument is now: would ElGamal have been invented had RSA never existed?
