Whitfield Diffie

“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.”

“Without strong encryption, you will be spied on systematically by lots of people.”

“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.”

“Two people can work on a problem better than one.”

“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.”

“I think that the people who are trying to shut down WikiLeaks are going to have to accept this as a fact of reality that cryptography allows you to do this kind of thing.”

“People constantly face problems they've never seen before, and they have to solve them somehow. So a million people come up with a million solutions that are just a little bit different. If computing is being done by fewer resources, there will be enormous security gains by pushing things into standard practices.”

“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 will be vulnerable until you invest the time and money to design another system.”

“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.”

“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 mathematician.”

“It isn't that secrets are never needed in security. It's that they are never desirable.”

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

“I am not convinced that lack of encryption is the primary problem. The problem with the Internet is that it is meant for communications among non-friends.”

“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.”