Whitfield Diffie | |
|---|---|
 Whitfield Diffie at theRoyal Society admissions day in London, July 2017 | |
| Born | Bailey Whitfield Diffie (1944-06-05)June 5, 1944 (age 81) Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Education | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS) |
| Known for | Diffie–Hellman key exchange |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Cryptography |
| Institutions | Stanford University Sun Microsystems ICANN Zhejiang University[3] Royal Holloway (ISG)[4] |
| Website | cisac |
Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' DiffieForMemRS (born June 5, 1944) is an Americancryptographer and mathematician and one of the pioneers ofpublic-key cryptography along withMartin Hellman andRalph Merkle. Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paperNew Directions in Cryptography[5] introduced a radically new method of distributingcryptographic keys, that helped solvekey distribution—a fundamental problem in cryptography. Their technique became known asDiffie–Hellman key exchange. The article stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, theasymmetric key algorithms.[6]
After his career atSun Microsystems, where he became a SunFellow, Diffie served for two and a half years as Vice President for Information Security and Cryptography at theInternet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (2010–2012). He has also served as a visiting scholar (2009–2010) and affiliate (2010–2012) at the Freeman Spogli Institute'sCenter for International Security and Cooperation atStanford University, where he is currently a consulting scholar.[7]
Diffie was born inWashington, D.C. His mother is Justine Louise (Whitfield), a writer and scholar. His father isBailey Wallys Diffie, who taughtIberian history and culture at theCity College of New York.[8] His interest in cryptography began at "age 10 when his father, a professor, brought home the entire crypto shelf of the City College Library in New York".[8]
AtJamaica High School inQueens, New York, Diffie "performed competently" but "never did apply himself to the degree his father hoped". Although he graduated with a local diploma, he did not take the statewide Regents examinations that would have awarded him an academic diploma because he had previously secured admission to theMassachusetts Institute of Technology on the basis of "stratospheric scores on standardized tests".[9] During the first two years of his undergraduate studies at MIT, he felt unengaged and seriously considered transferring to theUniversity of California, Berkeley, where he perceived as a more hospitable academic environment. At MIT, he began to program computers (in an effort to cultivate a practical skill set) while continuing to perceive the devices "as very low class... I thought of myself as a pure mathematician and was very interested inpartial differential equations andtopology and things like that."[9]
Diffie received aBachelor of Science with a major inmathematics from the MIT in 1965.[9]
From 1965 to 1969, he remained inGreater Boston as a research assistant for theMITRE Corporation inBedford, Massachusetts. As MITRE was a defense contractor, this position enabled Diffie (a pacifist who opposed theVietnam War) to avoidthe draft. During this period, he helped to developMATHLAB (an early symbolic manipulation system that served as the basis forMacsyma) and other non-military applications.
In November 1969, Diffie became a research programmer at theStanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he worked onLISP 1.6 (widely distributed toPDP-10 systems running theTOPS-10 operating system) andcorrectness problems while cultivating interests in cryptography andcomputer security under the aegis ofJohn McCarthy.
Diffie left SAIL to pursue independent research in cryptography in May 1973. As the most current research in the field during the epoch fell under the classified oversight of theNational Security Agency, Diffie "went around doing one of the things I am good at, which is digging up rare manuscripts in libraries, driving around, visiting friends at universities." He was assisted by his new girlfriend and future wife, Mary Fischer.[10]
In the summer of 1974, Diffie and Fischer met with a friend at theThomas J. Watson Research Center (headquarters ofIBM Research) inYorktown Heights, New York, which housed one of the only nongovernmental cryptographic research groups in the United States. While group director Alan Konheim "couldn't tell [Diffie] very much because of a secrecy order," he advised him to meet withMartin Hellman, a youngelectrical engineering professor atStanford University who was also pursuing a cryptographic research program.[11] A planned half-hour meeting between Diffie and Hellman extended over many hours as they shared ideas and information.[11]
Hellman then hired Diffie as a grant-funded part-time research programmer for the 1975 spring term. Under his sponsorship, he also enrolled as a doctoral student in electrical engineering at Stanford in June 1975; however, Diffie was once again unable to acclimate to "homework assignments [and] the structure" and eventually dropped out after failing to complete a required physical examination: "I didn't feel like doing it, I didn't get around to it."[9] Although it is unclear when he dropped out, Diffie remained employed in Hellman's lab as a research assistant through June 1978.[12]
In 1975–76, Diffie and Hellman criticized theNBS proposedData Encryption Standard, largely because its 56-bit key length was too short to preventbrute-force attack. An audio recording survives of their review of DES at Stanford in 1976 with Dennis Branstad ofNBS and representatives of theNational Security Agency.[13] Their concern was well-founded: subsequent history has shown not only that NSA actively intervened with IBM and NBS to shorten the key size, but also that the short key size enabled exactly the kind of massively parallel key crackers that Hellman and Diffie sketched out.[citation needed] When these were ultimately built outside the classified world (EFF DES cracker), they made it clear that DES was insecure and obsolete.
From 1978 to 1991, Diffie was Manager of Secure Systems Research forNorthern Telecom inMountain View, California, where he designed the key management architecture for the PDSO security system forX.25 networks.[14] He was named anIEEE fellow in 2025 for the development of public key cryptography and its applications.[15]
In 1991, he joinedSun Microsystems Laboratories inMenlo Park, California, as a distinguishedengineer, working primarily on public policy aspects of cryptography. Diffie remained with Sun, serving as its chief security officer and as a vice president until November 2009. He was also a Sun Fellow.[16]
As of 2008[update], Diffie was a visiting professor at theInformation Security Group based atRoyal Holloway, University of London.[17]
In May 2010, Diffie joined the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as vice president for information security and cryptography, a position he left in October 2012.[18]
Diffie is a member of the technical advisory boards of BlackRidge Technology, andCryptomathic where he collaborates with researchers such asVincent Rijmen,Ivan Damgård andPeter Landrock.[19]
In 2018, he joinedZhejiang University, China, as a visiting professor, Cryptic Labs generated 2 months course in Zhejiang University.
In the early 1970s, Diffie worked withMartin Hellman to develop the fundamental ideas of dual-key, orpublic key,cryptography. They published their results in 1976—solving one of the fundamental problems of cryptography,key distribution—and essentially broke themonopoly that had previously existed wheregovernment entities controlled cryptographic technology and the terms on which other individuals could have access to it. "From the moment Diffie and Hellman published their findings..., the National Security Agency's crypto monopoly was effectively terminated. ... Every company, every citizen now had routine access to the sorts of cryptographic technology that not many years ago ranked alongside the atom bomb as a source of power."[8] The solution has become known asDiffie–Hellman key exchange.
Together withMartin Hellman, Diffie won the 2015Turing Award, widely considered themost prestigious award in the field of computer science. The citation for the award was: "For fundamental contributions to modern cryptography. Diffie and Hellman's groundbreaking 1976 paper, 'New Directions in Cryptography', introduced the ideas ofpublic-key cryptography anddigital signatures, which are the foundation for most regularly-used security protocols on the internet today."[21]
Diffie received anhonorary doctorate from theSwiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1992.[14] He is also a fellow of theMarconi Foundation and visiting fellow of theIsaac Newton Institute. He has received various awards from other organisations. In July 2008, he was also awarded a Degree of Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) byRoyal Holloway, University of London.[22]
He was also awarded theIEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award in 1981 (together withMartin E. Hellman),[23]The Franklin Institute'sLouis E. Levy Medal in 1997[24] a Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from theIEEE Information Theory Society in 1998,[25] and theIEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 2010.[26] In 2011, Diffie was inducted into theNational Inventors Hall of Fame and named aFellow of theComputer History Museum "for his work, with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle, on public key cryptography."[27] Diffie was elected aForeign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2017.[2] Diffie was also elected a member of theNational Academy of Engineering in 2017 for the invention of public key cryptography and for broader contributions to privacy.
Diffie self-identifies as aniconoclast. He has stated that he "was always concerned aboutindividuals, anindividual's privacy as opposed togovernment secrecy."[8]
Whitfield Diffie's amazing breakthrough could guarantee computer privacy. But the Government, fearing crime and terror, wants to co-opt his magic key and listen in. ... High-tech has created a huge privacy gap. But miraculously, a fix has emerged: cheap, easy-to-use-, virtually unbreakable encryption. Cryptography is the silver bullet by which we can hope to reclaim our privacy. ... a remarkable discovery made almost 20 years ago, a breakthrough that combined with the obscure field of cryptography into the mainstream of communications policy. It began with Whitfield Diffie, a young computer scientist and cryptographer. He did not work for the government. ... He had been bitten by the cryptography bug at age 10 when his father, a professor, brought home the entire crypto shelf of the City College Library in New York. ... [Diffie] was always concerned about individuals, an individual's privacy as opposed to Government secrecy. ... Diffie, now 50, is still committed to those beliefs. ... [Diffie] and Martin E. Hellman, an electrical engineering professor at Stanford University, created a crypto revolution. ... Diffie was dissatisfied with the security [on computer systems]... in the 1960s [because] a system manager had access to all passwords. ... A perfect system would eliminate the need for a trusted third party. ... led Diffie to think about a more general problem in cryptography: key management. ... When Diffie moved to Stanford University in 1969, he foresaw the rise of home computer terminals [and pondered] how to use them to make transactions. ... in the mid-1970s, Diffie and Hellman achieved a stunning breakthrough that changed cryptography forever. They split the cryptographic key. In their system, every user has two keys, a public one and a private one, that are unique to their owner. Whatever is scrambled by one key can be unscrambled by the other. ... It was an amazing solution, but even more remarkable was that this split-key system solved both of Diffie's problems, the desire to shield communications from eavesdroppers and also to provide a secure electronic identification for contracts and financial transactions done by computer. It provided the identification by the use of 'digital signatures' that verify the sender much the same way that a real signature validates a check or contract. ... From the moment Diffie and Hellman published their findings in 1976, the National Security Agency's crypto monopoly was effectively terminated. ... Every company, every citizen now had routine access to the sorts of cryptographic technology that not many years ago ranked alongside the atom bomb as a source of power.'
Whitfield Diffie, Chief Security Officer of Sun Microsystems, is Vice President and Sun Fellow and has been at Sun since 1991. As Chief Security Officer, Diffie is the chief exponent of Sun's security vision and responsible for developing Sun's strategy to achieve that vision.
Globally recognized as a leader in public-key cryptography, encryption and network security, Diffie has a long and distinguished career as a leading force for innovative thought. He brings extensive experience in the design, development and implementation of security methods for networks. ... Prior to coming to ICANN, Diffie served as Vice President, Fellow, and Chief Security Officer withSun Microsystems, at which he had worked from 1991 to 2009. At Sun, Diffie focused on the most fundamental security problems facing modern communications and computing with emphasis on public policy as well as technology. Prior to joining Sun, Diffie was Manager of Secure Systems Research forNorthern Telecom, where he played a key role in the design of Northern's first packet security product and in developing the group that was later to becomeEntrust.
