Professor Whitfield Diffie

Chief Technology Officer

 

Whitfield Diffie is Consulting Professor in the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and Visiting Professor at Royal-Holloway College of the University of London.

 

Diffie began his career in security as the inventor of the concept of public

key cryptography, which underlies the security of internet commerce.  He has

made fundamental contributions to many aspects of secure communications and was instrumental in the rise of a public cryptographic research community. In the 1990s he turned his attention to public policy and played a key role in opposing government key-escrow proposals and restrictive regulations on the export of

products incorporating cryptography. Diffie recently retired from his position as Chief Security Officer at Sun Microsystems and is now studying the impact of web services and grid computing on security and intelligence.

 

Diffie's is a fellow of the Marconi Foundation, fellow of the Computer History Museum, and an inductee of both the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame.  He is the reccipient of the National Computer Systems Security Award given jointly by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Security Agency, the the Levy prize of the Franklin institute, and other awards. Diffie's work and career are treated at length in the book Crypto by Steven Levy.