Editing Whitfield Diffie

{{Short description|American cryptographer (born 1944)}}
{{Redirect|Diffie|the country music singer|Joe Diffie}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=January 2025}}
{{Infobox scientist
| name              = Whitfield Diffie
| image = Whitfield Diffie Royal Society.jpg
| image_size        = 
| alt               = Whitfield Diffie
| caption           = Whitfield Diffie at the [[Royal Society]] admissions day in London, July 2017
| birth_name        = Bailey Whitfield Diffie
| birth_date        = {{birth date and age|1944|06|05}}
| birth_place       = [[Washington, D.C.]], U.S.
| death_date        = 
| death_place       = 
| fields            = [[Cryptography]]
| workplaces        = [[Stanford University]]<br />[[Sun Microsystems]]<br />[[ICANN]]<br />[[Zhejiang University]]<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/2018/0705/c19573a819705/page.htm|title=Turing Laureate Whitfield Diffie joins ZJU as full-time professor|access-date=September 19, 2018|archive-date=September 20, 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180920011146/http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/2018/0705/c19573a819705/page.htm|url-status=live}}</ref><br />[[Royal Holloway, University of London|Royal Holloway]] ([[Information Security Group|ISG]])<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://royalsociety.org/people/whitfield-diffie-13385/|title=Whitfield Diffie &#124; Royal Society|access-date=May 7, 2017|archive-date=May 5, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170505135951/https://royalsociety.org/people/whitfield-diffie-13385/|url-status=live}}</ref>
| education         = [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] ([[Bachelor of Science|BS]])
| known_for         = [[Diffie–Hellman key exchange]]
| awards            = {{Plainlist|
* [[Paris Kanellakis Award|Kanellakis Award]] (1996)
* [[Marconi Prize]] (2000)
* [[IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal|IEEE Hamming Medal]] (2010)
* [[Computer History Museum]] Fellow (2011)<ref name="computerhistory">{{cite web|url=http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/bios/Whitfield,Diffie/|publisher=computerhistory.org|title=Whitfield Diffie 2011 Fellow|access-date=January 27, 2017|archive-date=July 3, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160703014545/http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/bios/Whitfield,Diffie/|url-status=dead}}</ref>
* [[Turing Award]] (2015)
* [[Foreign Member of the Royal Society|ForMemRS]]  (2015)<ref name=formemrs/>}}
| website           = {{URL|http://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/people/whitfield_diffie}}
}}
'''Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie''' [[ForMemRS]] (born June 5, 1944) is an American [[cryptographer]] and mathematician and one of the pioneers of [[public-key cryptography]] along with [[Martin Hellman]] and [[Ralph Merkle]]. Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper ''New Directions in Cryptography''<ref name=newdirections/> introduced a radically new method of distributing [[cryptography|cryptographic]] keys, that helped solve [[key distribution]]—a fundamental problem in cryptography. Their technique became known as [[Diffie–Hellman key exchange]]. The article stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the [[asymmetric key algorithm]]s.<ref>Levy, 2001, p. 90ff</ref>

After a long career at [[Sun Microsystems]], where he became a Sun [[Fellow]], Diffie served for two and a half years as Vice President for Information Security and Cryptography at the [[ICANN|Internet 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's [[Center for International Security and Cooperation]] at [[Stanford University]], where he is currently a consulting scholar.<ref name="stanford">{{cite web|url=http://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/people/whitfield_diffie|publisher=cisac.fsi.stanford.edu|title=FSI &#124; CISAC - Whitfield Diffie|access-date=January 27, 2017|archive-date=January 2, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170102213949/http://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/people/whitfield_diffie|url-status=live}}</ref>

== Early life and education ==
Diffie was born in [[Washington, D.C.]] His mother is Justine Louise (Whitfield), a writer and scholar. His father is [[Bailey W. Diffie|Bailey Wallys Diffie]], who taught [[Iberian Peninsula|Iberian]] history and culture at the [[City College of New York]].<ref name=nytm19940712/> 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".<ref name=nytm19940712/>

At [[Jamaica High School]] in [[Queens, 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 the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] on the basis of "stratospheric scores on standardized tests".<ref name="books.google.com">{{cite book|title=Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government--Saving Privacy in the Digital Age|author=Levy, S.|date=2001|publisher=Penguin Publishing Group|isbn=9781101199466|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VOxpXwHmQMgC|access-date=January 27, 2017|archive-date=April 5, 2024|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240405043519/https://books.google.com/books?id=VOxpXwHmQMgC|url-status=live}}</ref> During the first two years of his undergraduate studies at MIT, he felt unengaged and seriously considered transferring to the [[University 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 in [[partial differential equations]] and [[topology]] and things like that."<ref name="books.google.com"/>

Diffie received a [[Bachelor of Science]] with a major in [[mathematics]] from the MIT in 1965.<ref name="books.google.com" />

==Career and research==
[[File:Whit Diffie at CFP 2007.jpg|thumb|Diffie at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference (CFP) in 2007]]

From 1965 to 1969, he remained in [[Greater Boston]] as a research assistant for the [[MITRE Corporation]] in [[Bedford, Massachusetts]]. As MITRE was a defense contractor, this position enabled Diffie (a pacifist who opposed the [[Vietnam War]]) to avoid [[the draft]]. During this period, he helped to develop [[MATHLAB]] (an early symbolic manipulation system that served as the basis for [[Macsyma]]) and other non-military applications.

In November 1969, Diffie became a research programmer at the [[Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory]], where he worked on [[Lisp (programming language)|LISP]] 1.6 (widely distributed to [[PDP-10]] systems running the [[TOPS-10]] operating system) and [[correctness (computer science)|correctness]] problems while cultivating interests in cryptography and [[computer security]] under the aegis of [[John McCarthy (computer scientist)|John 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 the [[National 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.<ref name="google">{{cite book|title=Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia|author1=Lambert, L.|author2=Poole, H.W.|author3=Woodford, C.|author3-link=Chris Woodford (author)|author4=Moschovitis, C.J.P.|author5=Moschovitis Group Staff|date=2005|publisher=ABC-CLIO, LLC|isbn=9781851096596|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qi-ItIG6QLwC&pg=PA78|page=78|access-date=January 27, 2017|archive-date=April 5, 2024|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240405043337/https://books.google.com/books?id=qi-ItIG6QLwC&pg=PA78|url-status=live}}</ref>

In the summer of 1974, Diffie and Fischer met with a friend at the [[Thomas J. Watson Research Center]] (headquarters of [[IBM Research]]) in [[Yorktown 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 with [[Martin Hellman]], a young [[electrical engineering]] professor at [[Stanford University]] who was also pursuing a cryptographic research program.<ref name="cacm.acm.org">{{cite web|url=http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/6/202666-qa-finding-new-directions-in-cryptography/fulltext|publisher=cacm.acm.org|title=Q&A: Finding New Directions in Cryptography &#124; June 2016 &#124; Communications of the ACM|date=June 2016 |access-date=January 27, 2017|archive-date=September 14, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160914193539/http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/6/202666-qa-finding-new-directions-in-cryptography/fulltext|url-status=live}}</ref> A planned half-hour meeting between Diffie and Hellman extended over many hours as they shared ideas and information.<ref name="cacm.acm.org"/>

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."<ref name="books.google.com"/> Although it is unclear when he dropped out, Diffie remained employed in Hellman's lab as a research assistant through June 1978.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/whitfield_diffie_cv_2015.pdf |title=Whitfield Diffie CV |access-date=August 26, 2016 |archive-date=August 27, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160827200430/http://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/whitfield_diffie_cv_2015.pdf |url-status=dead }}</ref>

In 1975–76, Diffie and Hellman criticized the [[National Bureau of Standards|NBS]] proposed [[Data Encryption Standard]], largely because its 56-bit key length was too short to prevent [[brute-force attack]]. An audio recording survives of their review of DES at Stanford in 1976 with Dennis Branstad of [[National Institute of Standards and Technology|NBS]] and representatives of the [[National Security Agency]].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.toad.com/des-stanford-meeting.html |title=DES (Data Encryption Standard) Review at Stanford University |year=1976 |access-date=March 20, 2012 |archive-date=May 3, 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120503083539/http://www.toad.com/des-stanford-meeting.html |url-status=live }}</ref> 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|date=May 2024}} 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 for [[Nortel Networks|Northern Telecom]] in [[Mountain View, California]], where he designed the key management architecture for the PDSO security system for [[X.25]] networks.<ref name=ol20110128>{{cite web|title=The People at Oracle Labs|url=http://labs.oracle.com/people/mybio.php?uid=18607|work=Bio|publisher=Oracle Corporation|access-date=January 28, 2011|date=n.d.|quote=''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.''|archive-date=July 18, 2011|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110718052957/http://labs.oracle.com/people/mybio.php?uid=18607|url-status=dead}}</ref>

In 1991, he joined [[Sun Microsystems]] Laboratories in [[Menlo Park, California]], as a distinguished [[engineer]], 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.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://research.sun.com/people/mybio.php?uid=18607 |title=Dr. Whitfield Diffie |work=Sun Microsystems employee pages |publisher=[[Sun Microsystems]] |access-date=August 19, 2010 |archive-date=August 21, 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090821024937/http://research.sun.com/people/mybio.php?uid=18607 |url-status=dead }}</ref>

{{as of|2008}}, Diffie was a visiting professor at the [[Information Security Group]] based at [[Royal Holloway, University of London]].<ref>[http://www.isg.rhul.ac.uk/alumniconference Alumni Reunion Conference] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080324041734/http://www.isg.rhul.ac.uk/alumniconference |date=March 24, 2008 }}, Information Security Group, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2008, accessed July 20, 2010.</ref>

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.<ref name="join_ICANN">{{cite web |url=http://www.icann.org/en/news/releases/release-14may10-en.pdf |title=Cryptography Legend Whit Diffie Joins the ICANN Team |date=May 14, 2010 |work=ICANN News Release |publisher=[[ICANN]] |access-date=January 28, 2011 |quote=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 with [[Sun 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 for [[Northern 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 become [[Entrust]]. |archive-date=November 25, 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101125080612/http://icann.org/en/news/releases/release-14may10-en.pdf |url-status=live }}</ref>

Diffie is a member of the technical advisory boards of BlackRidge Technology, and [[Cryptomathic]] where he collaborates with researchers such as [[Vincent Rijmen]], [[Ivan Damgård]] and [[Peter Landrock]].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.cryptomathic.com/company/management-team |title=Cryptomathic Management Team |access-date=April 5, 2013 |archive-date=March 8, 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130308165733/http://www.cryptomathic.com/company/management-team |url-status=live }}</ref>

In 2018, he joined [[Zhejiang University]], China, as a visiting professor, Cryptic Labs generated 2 months course in Zhejiang University.

===Public key cryptography===
In the early 1970s, Diffie worked with [[Martin Hellman]] to develop the fundamental ideas of dual-key, or [[public key]], [[cryptography]]. They published their results in 1976—solving one of the fundamental problems of cryptography, [[key distribution]]—and essentially broke the [[monopoly]] that had previously existed where [[State (polity)|government 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."<ref name=nytm19940712>
{{cite news|last=Levy|first=Steven |title=Battle of the Clipper Chip |newspaper=[[New York Times Magazine]] |date=July 12, 1994 |pages=44–51, plus cover photo of Diffie |quote=''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.'''}}</ref> The solution has become known as [[Diffie–Hellman key exchange]].

===Publications===
* ''Privacy on the Line'' with [[Susan Landau]] in 1998. An updated and expanded edition was published in 2007.<ref>{{cite book|url=https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/privacy-line|title=Privacy on the Line, Updated And Expanded Edition: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption|publisher=MIT Press|author1=Whitfield Diffie|author2=Susan Landau|date=January 5, 1998|isbn=9780262041676|access-date=November 29, 2015|archive-date=December 8, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151208121915/https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/privacy-line|url-status=live}}</ref>
* ''New directions in cryptography'' in 1976 with [[Martin Hellman]].<ref name=newdirections>{{cite journal|title=New directions in cryptography|journal=IEEE Transactions on Information Theory |volume=22|issue=6|pages=644|doi=10.1109/TIT.1976.1055638|author1=Whitfield Diffie|author2=Martin Hellman|year=1976|citeseerx = 10.1.1.37.9720}}</ref>

===Awards and honors===
Together with [[Martin Hellman]], Diffie won the 2015 [[Turing Award]], widely considered the [[List of prizes known as the Nobel of a field|most 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 of [[public-key cryptography]] and [[digital signatures]], which are the foundation for most regularly-used security protocols on the internet today."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/diffie_8371646.cfm|title=Cryptography Pioneers Receive 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award|publisher=ACM|access-date=March 3, 2016|archive-date=July 4, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170704184453/http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/diffie_8371646.cfm|url-status=live}}</ref>

Diffie received an [[honorary doctorate]] from the [[Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich|Swiss Federal Institute of Technology]] in 1992.<ref name=ol20110128/> He is also a fellow of the [[Marconi Foundation]] and visiting fellow of the [[Isaac 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) by [[Royal Holloway, University of London]].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.isg.rhul.ac.uk/node/284 |title=Honorary Degree awarded to Prof Whitfield Diffie, Visiting Professor to the ISG |work=[[Information Security Group]] website |publisher=[[Royal Holloway University]] |access-date=August 19, 2010 |archive-date=July 17, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110717052949/http://www.isg.rhul.ac.uk/node/284 |url-status=dead }}</ref>

He was also awarded the [[IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award]] in 1981 (together with [[Martin E. Hellman]]),<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.ieee.org/documents/fink_rl.pdf |title=IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award Recipients |publisher=IEEE |access-date=November 11, 2010 |archive-date=June 20, 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160620233024/http://www.ieee.org/documents/fink_rl.pdf |url-status=dead }}</ref> [[The Franklin Institute]]'s [[Louis E. Levy Medal]] in 1997<ref name="LevyMedal_Laureates">{{cite web |url=http://www.fi.edu/winners/show_results.faw?gs=&ln=&fn=&keyword=&subject=&award=LEVY+&sy=1923&ey=1999&name=Submit |title=Franklin Laureate Database - Louis E. Levy Medal Laureates |publisher=[[Franklin Institute]] |access-date=January 22, 2011 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110629195033/http://www.fi.edu/winners/show_results.faw?gs=&ln=&fn=&keyword=&subject=&award=LEVY+&sy=1923&ey=1999&name=Submit |archive-date=June 29, 2011 }}</ref> a Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the [[IEEE Information Theory Society]] in 1998,<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.itsoc.org/honors/golden-jubilee-awards-for-technological-innovation |title=Golden Jubilee Awards for Technological Innovation |publisher=[[IEEE Information Theory Society]] |access-date=July 14, 2011 |archive-date=July 21, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110721221646/http://www.itsoc.org/honors/golden-jubilee-awards-for-technological-innovation |url-status=live }}</ref> and the [[IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal]] in 2010.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.ieee.org/documents/hamming_rl.pdf |title=IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal Recipients |publisher=IEEE |access-date=November 11, 2010 |archive-date=October 17, 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121017220649/http://www.ieee.org/documents/hamming_rl.pdf |url-status=dead }}</ref> In 2011, Diffie was inducted into the [http://www.invent.org/honor/inductees/inductee-detail/?IID=428 National Inventors Hall of Fame] and named a [[Fellow]] of the [[Computer History Museum]] "for his work, with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle, on public key cryptography."<ref>{{cite web
 | url = http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/bios/Whitfield,Diffie/
 | title = Whitfield Diffie
 | publisher = Computer History Museum
 | access-date = May 23, 2013
 | archive-date = July 3, 2016
 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20160703014545/http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/bios/Whitfield,Diffie/
 | url-status = dead
 }}</ref> Diffie was elected a [[List of Fellows of the Royal Society elected in 2017|Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2017]].<ref name=formemrs>{{cite web|url=https://royalsociety.org/people/whitfield-diffie-13385/|title=Whitfield Diffie|publisher=[[Royal Society]]|year=2017|website=royalsociety.org|author=Anon|location=London|access-date=May 7, 2017|archive-date=May 5, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170505135951/https://royalsociety.org/people/whitfield-diffie-13385/|url-status=live}}</ref> Diffie was also elected a member of the [[National Academy of Engineering]] in 2017 for the invention of public key cryptography and for broader contributions to privacy.

==Personal life==
Diffie self-identifies as an [[Iconoclasm|iconoclast]]. He has stated that he "was always concerned about [[Individualism|individuals]], an [[Privacy#An individual right|individual's privacy]] as opposed to [[Secrecy#Government|government secrecy]]."<ref name=nytm19940712/>

==References==
{{Reflist|35em}}

==Further reading==
* [[Steven Levy]], ''[[Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age|Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government — Saving Privacy in the Digital Age]]'', {{ISBN|0-14-024432-8}}, 2001.
* [http://purl.umn.edu/107353 Oral history interview with Martin Hellman] Oral history interview 2004, Palo Alto, California. [[Charles Babbage Institute]], University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. [[Martin Hellman|Hellman]] describes his invention of [[public key cryptography]] with collaborators Whitfield Diffie and [[Ralph Merkle]] at Stanford University in the mid-1970s. He also relates his subsequent work in cryptography with [[Steve Pohlig]] (the [[Pohlig–Hellman algorithm]]) and others. Hellman addresses the [[National Security Agency]]'s (NSA) early efforts to contain and discourage academic work in the field, the Department of Commerce's [[ITAR|encryption export restrictions]], and key escrow (the so-called [[Clipper chip]]). He also touches on the commercialization of cryptography with [[RSA Data Security]] and [[VeriSign]].
* [https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.11/diffie.html?pg=1&topic= Wired Magazine biography of Whitfield Diffie]
* [https://www.networkworld.com/article/948802/crypto-dream-team-diffie-hellman-win-nobel-prize-of-computing.html Crypto dream team Diffie & Hellman wins 2015 "Nobel Prize of Computing"]. ''[[Network World]]''.

==External links==
{{Commons category}}
* [http://www.crankygeeks.com/2008/09/episode_133_a_classic_crankyge.php Cranky Geeks Episode 133] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120215005438/http://www.crankygeeks.com/2008/09/episode_133_a_classic_crankyge.php |date=February 15, 2012 }}
* [http://chaosradio.ccc.de/cri008.html Interview with Whitfield Diffie on Chaosradio Express International]
* [http://www.crankygeeks.com/2007/07/episode_71_how_vulnerable_are.php#comments Cranky Geeks Episode 71] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071011072324/http://www.crankygeeks.com/2007/07/episode_71_how_vulnerable_are.php#comments |date=October 11, 2007 }}
* [http://www.crypto.com/papers/paa-ieee.pdf Risking Communications Security: Potential Hazards of the Protect America Act]
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYV0z8P_TsI#t=0s RSA Conference 2010 USA: The Cryptographers Panel 1/6], video with Diffie participating on the Cryptographer's Panel, April 21, 2009, Moscone Center, San Francisco
*[https://nordsense.com/ Nordsense: Security advisor 2017- Present]

{{Kanellakis Award laureates}}
{{Richard W. Hamming Medal recipients}}
{{Turing Award laureates}}
{{FRS 2017}}
{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Diffie, Whitfield}}
[[Category:1944 births]]
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:American cryptographers]]
[[Category:Public-key cryptographers]]
[[Category:Nortel employees]]
[[Category:Sun Microsystems people]]
[[Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni]]
[[Category:Stanford University School of Engineering alumni]]
[[Category:International Association for Cryptologic Research fellows]]
[[Category:Turing Award laureates]]
[[Category:Foreign members of the Royal Society]]
[[Category:American computer security academics]]
[[Category:Recipients of the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana, 3rd Class]]
[[Category:Jamaica High School (New York City) alumni]]