Bailey Whitfield Diffie Quotes

United States, Cryptographer
June 5, 1944

Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie (born June 5, 1944), ForMemRS, is an American cryptographer and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography introduced a radically new method of distributing cryptographic keys, that helped solve key distribution—a fundamental problem in cryptography. Their technique became known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The article stimulated the almost immediate public development of a new class of encryption algorithms, the asymmetric key algorithms.

Two people can work on a problem better than one.

Bailey Whitfield Diffie
- People
- Work
- Problem
The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets.

Bailey Whitfield Diffie
- Secret
- Security
- Reliance

We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions.

Bailey Whitfield Diffie
I thought cryptography was a technique that did not require your trusting other people-that if you encrypted your files, you would have the control to make the choice as to whether you would surrender your files.

Bailey Whitfield Diffie
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.

Bailey Whitfield Diffie
Some people make sharp distinctions sort of between their recreational musings and their professional work. I don't make that distinction very much.

Bailey Whitfield Diffie
One of the things that characterizes good intellectual work is a certain self-importance.

Bailey Whitfield Diffie
I have been working on two problems for three years: one of them for 8 or 9 years, and one of them for 3, 4, 5 years.

Bailey Whitfield Diffie
- Years
- Problems

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.

Bailey Whitfield Diffie
Without strong encryption, you will be spied on systematically by lots of people.

Bailey Whitfield Diffie
- People
- Encryption
- Spied
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.

Bailey Whitfield Diffie
- Work
- Politics
- Problems
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.

Bailey Whitfield Diffie
- I Love
- France
- Campus
I have always believed the thesis that one's politics and the character of one's intellectual work are inseparable.

Bailey Whitfield Diffie
- Work
- Character
- Politics
If you have ambition, you might not achieve anything, but without ambition, you are almost certain not to achieve anything.

Bailey Whitfield Diffie
- Ambition
- Achieve

If you say to people that they, as a matter of fact, can't protect their conversations, in particular their political conversations, I think you take a long step toward making a transition from a free society to a totalitarian society.

Bailey Whitfield Diffie