Whitfield Diffie
Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie (born June 5, 1944), ForMemRS, 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 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.
Whitfield Diffie | |
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Whitfield Diffie at the Royal Society admissions day in London, July 2017 | |
| Born | Bailey Whitfield Diffie June 5, 1944 Washington, D.C., United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S., 1965) |
| Known for | Diffie–Hellman key exchange |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Cryptography |
| Institutions | Stanford University Sun Microsystems ICANN Zhejiang University Royal Holloway (ISG) |
| Website | cisac |
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.