X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Whitfield Diffie


Diffie–Hellman problem

The Diffie–Hellman problem (DHP) is a mathematical problem first proposed by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in the context of cryptography.

National Cyber Security Hall of Fame

Whitfield Diffie - Developed the world's earliest public key cryptographic system along with Merkle and Hellman

Newegg

Whitfield Diffie and Ron Rivest, the inventors of public-key cryptography and RC4 encryption respectively, testified for Newegg.

Spycatcher

After the re-discovery and commercial use of PKI by Rivest, Shamir, Diffie and others, the British government considered releasing the records of GCHQ's successes in this field.


Bell-Northern Research

At its zenith in the early 1980s, when it opened R&D centers in Mountain View, and later in Research Triangle Park and Richardson, Texas, BNR's notable American employees included Whitfield Diffie, a noted authority on cryptography, and Bob Gaskins, who invented PowerPoint at BNR, using new bit-mapped displays to make presentations to management.

James H. Ellis

When, a few years later, Diffie and Hellman published their 1976 paper, and shortly after that Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman announced their algorithm, Cocks, Ellis, and Williamson suggested that GCHQ announce that they had previously developed both.

Scrambler

It was the need to synchronize the scramblers that suggested to James H. Ellis the idea for non-secret encryption which ultimately led to the invention of both the RSA encryption algorithm and Diffie-Hellman key exchange well before either was reinvented publicly by Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman, or by Diffie and Hellman.


see also