Whitfield Diffie - Background and Career

Background and Career

Diffie's 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."

He received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965 and did graduate studies at Stanford University. He received an honorary doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1992.

In 1975-76, Diffie and Martin Hellman criticized the 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 NBS and representatives of the National Security Agency. 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. When these were ultimately built outside the classified world, they made it clear that DES was insecure and obsolete. In 2012, a $10,000 commercially available machine can recover a DES key in days.

Diffie was Manager of Secure Systems Research for Northern Telecom, where he designed the key management architecture for the PDSO security system for X.25 networks.

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 is also a Sun Fellow.

In 1992 he was awarded a Doctorate in Technical Sciences (Honoris Causa) by the ETH Zurich. 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. He was also awarded the IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award in 1981 (together with Martin E. Hellman), the The Franklin Institute's Louis E. Levy Medal in 1997 a Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation from the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1998, and the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 2010.

As of 2008, Diffie was a visiting professor at the Information Security Group based at Royal Holloway, University of London.

In May 2010, Diffie joined the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as Vice President for Information Security and Cryptography.