6 Quotes & Sayings By Whitfield Diffie

Whitfield Diffie is the Jack S. Blanton Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has worked since 1967. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1968, and his Ph.D Read more

in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1972. He is also Professor of Computer Science at Rice University. His research interests are in information security, public-key cryptography, and network security.

1
The decisions we make about communication security today will determine the kind of society we live in tomorrow. Whitfield Diffie
2
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. Whitfield Diffie
3
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. Whitfield Diffie
4
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. Whitfield Diffie
5
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. Whitfield Diffie