About Whitfield Diffie: Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie is an American cryptographer and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography.
I understood the importance in principle of public key cryptography but it's all moved much faster than I expected. I did not expect it to be a mainstay of advanced communications technology.
If you are designing cryptosystems, you've got to think about long-term applications. You've got to try to figure out how to build something that is secure against technology in the next century that you cannot even imagine.
The most important impact of technology on communications security is that it draws better and better traffic into vulnerable channels.
I certainly enjoy going on stage and lecturing and talking to Congress. That's a personality explanation. And given government proposals, I thought I had a clear view that they were antagonistic to human freedom.
The decisions we make about communication security today will determine the kind of society we live in tomorrow.
I was, from early on, interested in science. And my parents were very obliging about that. My father used to take me to the museum of natural history, and I knew much more scientific stuff early on. From the time I was 11 or 12, I wanted to be a math...
If you depend on a secret for your security, what do you do when the secret is discovered? If it is easy to change, like a cryptographic key, you do so. If it's hard to change, like a cryptographic system or an operating system, you're stuck. You wil...
I thought of computers as very low class. I thought of myself as a pure mathematician and was interested in partial differential equations and topology and things like that.
People meet in bars after work all over the world and talk about the great problems of life and death and the world and politics and they don't take themselves seriously. They can do nothing else except chat about these things in bars after work.
I guess, in a very real sense, I'm a Gnostic. I had been looking all my life for some great mystery... I think somewhere deep in my mind is the notion that if I could learn just the right thing, I would be saved.
One of the things that characterizes good intellectual work is a certain self-importance.
We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions.
In a sense, communications networks can be defined entirely by who has cryptographic keys, and I think a lot of networks will work that way in the future.
No right of private conversation was enumerated in the Constitution. I suppose it never occurred to anyone at the time that it could be prevented.
I think, and I've thought this for a long time, that we live, roughly speaking, in the last generation of human beings.
Cloud computing means you are doing your computing on somebody else's computer. Looking ahead a little, I firmly believe cloud - previously called grid computing - will become very widespread. It's much cheaper than buying your own computing infrastr...
I liked Berkeley tremendously, Berkeley was a very leftist campus. I came to love that city as much as I love Paris or the south of France or New York.
I really believe in the radical viewpoint. And I have always believed that one's politics and the character of his particular work are inseparable.
If you have ambition, you might not achieve anything, but without ambition, you are almost certain not to achieve anything.
Lots of people working in cryptography have no deep concern with real application issues. They are trying to discover things clever enough to write papers about.
