Whitfield Diffie

From CryptoDox, The Online Encyclopedia on Cryptography and Information Security

Whitfield Diffie (born June 5, 1944) is a US cryptographer and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965.

Diffie and Martin Hellman's paper New Directions in Cryptography was published in 1976. It introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, which went far toward solving one of the fundamental problems of cryptography, key distribution. It has become known as Diffie-Hellman key exchange. The article also seems to have stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms.