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Whitfield Diffie, Jim Bidzos and Bruce Schneier
September 30, 2002 12:00 PM ET
Computerworld -
Twenty years before the Internet would create a need for it, a public-key cryptographic standard was discovered and patented by Whitfield Diffie, along with another student and a professor at Stanford University.
Diffie-Hellman was released free to the technical community, ultimately becoming the ubiquitous standard it is today. In his 20 years of waiting for the market's need to catch up with the standard, Diffie coached another visionary who sought to commercialize a different form of encryption. That standard was RSA, discovered by three MIT researchers, and that visionary was Jim Bidzos, who kept RSA Data Security Inc. alive for the 12 years it took for the market's need to catch up with the algorithm.
Diffie's and Bidzos' patience paid off. Both algorithms are bundled in browser security and just about every network protocol in existence, says Dorothy Denning, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University who has written extensively about both standards.
In her many writings on information security, Denning has also often quoted a third cryptographer, Bruce Schneier, who hails from a background of cryptographic management for the military and whose seminal 1993 book, Applied Cryptography (John Wiley & Sons), has brought cryptographic concepts to the mainstream.
Whitfield Diffie
Whitfield Diffie, CSO at Sun Microsystems Inc.
Claim to fame: Co-discoverer of public key cryptography, now an Internet standard called Diffie-Hellman.
What he's doing now: Chief security officer at Sun Microsystems Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif.
In 1976, Diffie and his wife, Mary, were struggling college students who lived in a car. Amid his poverty as a Stanford student in the '70s, Diffie was working on complex mathematical algorithms to help protect freedom of speech and privacy in the coming digital age.
Things were a little better when Diffie discovered the solution to these problems in the form of public-key cryptography, which uses public and private digital keys to scramble and unscramble data.
But as Diffie waited the 20 years it would take for the Diffie-Hellman algorithm to be needed, he also fought to lift export-control laws that would hamper people's ability to use encryption, particularly overseas. Those export-control laws were abolished in the late '90s.
"Whit Diffie has been a very public figure for all the right causes. Internet freedom and privacy through cryptography are his personal vision. He's talked to very influential people. A lot of it is due to the sheer force of his personality," says fellow cryptographer Bruce Schneier.
Jim Bidzos
Age: 47
Claim to fame: Took a leadership position at RSA Security
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