Whitfield Diffie
Co-Author of Public-Key Cryptography
Diffie–Hellman key exchange, and the end of the shared-secret era
Rating
98Impact score
Domains
CryptographyKey exchangePolicy
Scouting report
With Martin Hellman, published “New Directions in Cryptography” in 1976 and showed that two parties who had never met could agree on a secret over a wire anyone could read. It broke a problem the field had considered permanent, and every TLS handshake since is a descendant. Shared the 2015 Turing Award for it, and spent decades afterwards arguing the civil-liberties side of the crypto policy fights.
Curator’s note
The paper that made secure commerce on a public network conceivable at all.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Whitfield Diffie by Duncan.Hull, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Sources
- 01Whitfield Diffie en.wikipedia.org
- 02New Directions in Cryptography (1976) ee.stanford.edu
- 03ACM A.M. Turing Award 2015 amturing.acm.org