Panelists included persons such as Whitfield Diffie, who is a cryptography pioneer and chief security officer at Sun Microsystems; Notes founder Ray Ozzie, now Microsoft's chief software architect, and Brian Snow, retired director for the National Security Agency's Information Assurance Directorate. They touched on a broad array of topics ranging from NSA obstacles and export regulations to decades-old research papers and the Clipper chip.

The concept of public key cryptography has evolved over the years and its principles are being extended into areas such as e-commerce, panelists noted. Public key cryptography uses public and private keys between sender and recipient of a message for security purposes. The sender encrypts a message with a public key and the recipient uses a private key to decrypt it. Its birth is traced to the November 1976 publishing of a paper entitled, "New Directions in Cryptography," by Diffie and Martin Hellman, who also served on Thursday's panel and is a Stanford University professor.

Snow cited the advent of e-commerce and the need to move money over the Internet as a seminal event in secure computing. "The industry was a dead start until e-commerce," he said.

The power of the Internet was not envisioned when cryptography began to emerge, Hellman said. Developers thought widespread commercial adoption of encryption would happen in 10 years, but it took about 25 years, he said.

"The time is not far off when electronic funds transfer will be used to buy a loaf of bread," said Hellman.