We should definitely celebrate Whitfield Diffie’s 78th birthday today, seeing as he’s one of the people whose work makes many of the products we use possible.
Diffie is a cryptographer who got interested in secret codes started when he was just ten years old. His father was a professor at City College in New York and brought home every book about cryptography in the college library. His father was not impressed with Whitfield’s academics because he “never did apply himself to the degree” his dad had hoped.
Diffie graduated high school, but didn’t bother to take the statewide academic exam because he’d already been admitted to MIT — not on the basis of his class grades, but because he scored so high on standardized tests. He still wasn’t all that interested, though, and considered transferring to a different college.
He learned to program computers at MIT, but only to develop a practical skill; he thought of himself as a pure mathematician. He graduated, though, and in 1969 got a job at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab where he worked on something that’s still a problem with the flavor of AI in vogue today: correctness problems. In computer science it has a more specific meaning, of course.
Anyway, in 1973 he left to research cryptography on his own. This was not that easy in those days, because the US National Security Agency (NSA) considered cryptography secret, and you needed a security clearance to even read some of the books about it. The next year he met Martin Hellman, a Stanford professor also interested in cryptography, and both got a job from him and enrolled in a PhD program.
He dropped out of the academic program, though, saying “I didn’t feel like doing it.” He kept working for Hellman, though, and in 1976 the pair published their new creation: public-key cryptography. It’s also known as Diffie-Hellman key exchange. They also ruffled feathers by criticizing the NSA’s “Data Encryption Standard,” saying it was much too easy to crack. They were right, and it later turned out the NSA had made it that way on purpose so they could read everyone’s encoded messages.
Diffie went on to work at Sun Microsystems for many years as a Sun Fellow and chief security officer. He’s won the Turing Award, numerous honorary doctorates (for which he didn’t have to study), and had been inducted into more than one hall of fame. He has always advocated individual privacy over government or corporate concerns, and as a result, not all that much about his personal life is public.
