Whitfield Diffie

"Diffie" redirects here. For the country music singer, see Joe Diffie.
Whitfield Diffie
Whitfield Diffie
Whitfield Diffie at the Royal Society admissions day in London, July 2017
Born
Bailey Whitfield Diffie

(1944-06-05) June 5, 1944 (age 80)
Washington, D.C., United States
Alma materMassachusetts Institute of Technology (SB, 1965)
Known forDiffie–Hellman key exchange
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsCryptography
InstitutionsStanford University
Sun Microsystems
ICANN
Zhejiang University[3]
Royal Holloway (ISG)[4]
Websitecisac.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[5] introduced a radically new method of distributing 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 algorithms.[6]

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 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.[7]

  1. ^ "Whitfield Diffie 2011 Fellow". computerhistory.org. Archived from the original on 2016-07-03. Retrieved 2017-01-27.
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference formemrs was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ "Turing Laureate Whitfield Diffie joins ZJU as full-time professor". Archived from the original on 2018-09-20. Retrieved 2018-09-19.
  4. ^ "Whitfield Diffie | Royal Society". Archived from the original on 2017-05-05. Retrieved 2017-05-07.
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference newdirections was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Levy, 2001, p. 90ff
  7. ^ "FSI | CISAC - Whitfield Diffie". cisac.fsi.stanford.edu. Archived from the original on 2017-01-02. Retrieved 2017-01-27.