Whitfield Diffie: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:35, 3 October 2014

Biography

Whitfield Diffie was born on June 5, 1944 in New York City to Bailey Wallace Diffie and Justine Louise Whitfield. Diffie was raised in an upper middle class, Jewish immigrant neighborhood of Queens, a community which he has described as particularly leftist and progressive. Diffie believed his mother to be "rather liberal," whereas his father was "an extremely conservative person."

Throughout high school, Diffie was interested in pure mathematics which he continued to pursue at MIT, graduating with a B.A. in 1965. Diffie was a self-proclaimed mediocre student who "barely graduated."

Diffie is currently a consulting professor at CISAC (The Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University) where he was previously a Visiting Scholar and Affiliate.

Public Key Cryptography

As a graduate student at Stanford University, Diffie co-developed public key cryptography alongside Dr. Martin Hellman. They published these developments in 1976 as "New Directions in Cryptography." The concept of public key cryptography has revolutionized e-commerce and communications channels by allowing for digital signatures and secure communication without prearranged keys.

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-The development of public key [[Cryptography|cryptography]] by Whitfield Diffie, [[Martin Hellman‎|Martin E. Hellman]] and [[Ralph Merkle|Ralph C. Merkle]] revolutionized the field of cryptography and has provided the security needed to enable safe commercial applications of the Internet. The trio’s work represented academia’s first contribution to what was once the research domain of government and military intelligence organizations. Whenever someone uses the Internet to make a purchase, submit personal information or needs to connect to a virtual private network, it is the security provided by public key cryptography that protects the sensitive data from prying eyes and enables the use of digital signatures to verify identity. Prior to the development of public key cryptography in 1976, the keys used to encrypt information needed to be exchanged over a secure, or private, communications channel before the encrypted information could be transferred over an insecure channel.
+Whitfield Diffie was born on June 5, 1944 in New York City to Bailey Wallace Diffie and Justine Louise Whitfield. Diffie was raised in an upper middle class, Jewish immigrant neighborhood of Queens, a community which he has described as particularly leftist and progressive. Diffie believed his mother to be "rather liberal," whereas his father was "an extremely conservative person."
-Drs. Diffie, Hellman and Merkle’s concept of public key cryptography allows the exchange to take place over the same insecure channel as the message itself without any secret prearrangement between the transmitter and receiver, creating many more avenues for secure communications. Their invention has enabled the proliferation of e-commerce over the Internet, an otherwise insecure communication channel, and has allowed electronic communications to replace a large portion of paper-based communications.
+Throughout high school, Diffie was interested in pure mathematics which he continued to pursue at MIT, graduating with a B.A. in 1965. Diffie was a self-proclaimed mediocre student who "barely graduated."
-An IEEE Member, Dr. Diffie was chief security officer at Sun Microsystems until 2009 and is currently visiting scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford and Vice President for Information Security at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
+Diffie is currently a consulting professor at CISAC (The Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University) where he was previously a Visiting Scholar and Affiliate.
+==Public Key Cryptography==
+As a graduate student at Stanford University, Diffie co-developed public key cryptography alongside Dr. Martin Hellman. They published these developments in 1976 as "New Directions in Cryptography." The concept of public key cryptography has revolutionized e-commerce and communications channels by allowing for digital signatures and secure communication without prearranged keys.
+==Further Reading==
+Kahn, David. The Codebreakers, rev. ed. New York: Scribner, 1996.
+Levy, Steven. "Prophet of Privacy." Wired Magazine, November 1994.
 [[Category:Communications|Diffie]] [[Category:Communication methods|Diffie]]