Whitfield Diffie

Whitfield Diffie is best known for pioneering public-key cryptography in the early 1970s. Before Diffie's 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography, written with Martin Hellman, encryption technology was primarily the domain of government. Public-key cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman key negotiation protocol made cryptography scalable to the Internet and revolutionized the landscape of security. For this work, Diffie and Hellman shared the ACM Turing Award in 2015. Diffie is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and in 2020 was inducted into the Cryptologic Hall of Honor of the U.S. National Security Agency.