Whitfield Diffie

Whitfield Diffie (born 1944) is an American cryptographer who, in 1976, together with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle, developed public key cryptography, a method of securing electronic communications. It provides security on the otherwise insecure Internet and is vital to areas such as electronic commerce. In traditional cryptography one key both encrypts and decrypts a message, so keys must be exchanged by couriers or other secure means. In public key cryptography each person has a unique pair consisting of a public key and a private key, and only the public key needs to be shared. A message encrypted with a person public key can be decrypted only with the matching private key, which provides privacy, and a message signed with a private key can be checked with the public key.