Meeting Your Hero
Imagine if you were a physicist, and you had the opportunity to speak to Isaac Newton, or, as a mathematician to speak, to Carl Friedrich Gauss? This week, it will happen for me, as Whitfield Diffie is coming along to speak to our students and guests.
And, so, I have never been so nervous in speaking to someone … even Queen Elizabeth II … than with the Father of Cryptography … Whitfield Diffie. For this, on Tuesday, I have the chance to speak to him:
Basically, if you’re a physicist, there’s a good chance that Brian Cox was the person that goes you into your area. For me, I do what I do because of Whitfield Diffie and Marty Hellman. I have read their paper so many times, and I just love how it secured our world. The work at Stanford (Hellman and Diffie) and MIT (Rivest, Shamir and Adleman) in the 1980s, too, has motivated me in my research and created our foundation of cybersecurity.
The Father of Cryptography
Whitfield (Whit) was first exposed to cryptography at the age of 10 (5th Grade) when a teacher gave a talk for a day and a half. He got serious into cryptography through the development of DES (Data Encryption Standard), and Whit thought that the standard should have more bits to make…
