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Whitfield Diffie's Brilliance Changed Face of Cryptography

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JAN HOPKINS, HOST (voice-over): Obsessed not with drugs but with privacy and computer security, they're feeding their heads at a conference on cryptography, the field of creating and deciphering secret codes. Arriving too light to catch Jefferson's Starship is another product of the '60s, who in some ways, still looks the part, Whitfield Diffie. It's not just his appearance that makes Diffie stand out in this crowd of cryptographers; Diffie is known as the man who invented public-key encryption. His groundbreaking work in the mid-1970s helped usher in the era of modern-day cryptography.

WHITFIELD DIFFIE, DISTINGUISHED ENGINEER, SUN MICROSYSTEMS: I'm on next, so I have to think about what I was going to say, but I've given that all of two minutes, so...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're all set.

DIFFIE: Right.

HOPKINS: Diffie's early technical work is only part of the reason he's a star in the crypto community. He's also blazed a trail in the public policy arena, crusading for rights of individuals and businesses to use encryption to protect their private communications. That stance has often put him at odds with U.S. government agencies, trying to keep encryption out of the hands of terrorists, criminals and other countries.

While that battle has subsided lately, another front has sprung up: the Internet.

DIFFIE: I call up Amazon. It seems to me they do a major thing wrong, right. I mean, they protect me against the loss of a $50 liability I have of something on my credit card, but they do nothing to protect me against somebody who is watching to see what books I'm interested in, what new perversions I've developed.

(LAUGHTER)

DIFFIE: You know, it's like the Buddhist conundrum about the man who's told to take a chicken where nobody would see and slaughter it, and six days later, he hadn't slaughtered the chicken, and the master said to him, why haven't you killed the chicken? He says, wherever I go, the chicken sees. (LAUGHTER)

DIFFIE: The explosion of the World Wide Web and the need for secure e-commerce transactions have made cryptography a hot issue in the early days of the 21st century.

This conference, sponsored by a company that ended up turning Diffie's discovery into a viable business, attracted some 7,500 participants. Nine years ago, less than a hundred showed up.

DIFFIE: As a matter of fact, one of the greatest and most charming surprises I had in my life was going to the RSA conference three years ago. The first time it was big. It sort of went from a few hundred to 2,500 all at once, and I had always envisioned this would be widely used. I never had any understanding what that would mean, which is hundreds and hundreds of people hussling around, trying to turn a buck off of this stuff. HOPKINS: Diffie, by contrast, did not try hard to turn a buck off this stuff. It's just one of the intriguing things about him.

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HOPKINS (voice-over): Whit Diffie and his wife, Mary Fisher (ph), have reasons to raise their glasses. Their living the good life in California. Diffie can afford to take long lunches. His job at Sun Microsystems plays well and gives him the freedom to spend time the way he wants. Mary is an Egyptologist who spends most of her time at the house she and Diffie own in Silicon Valley.

But 25 years ago, it was is a different story. Diffie was doing research at Stanford and house-sitting for his boss. One day, Mary found him crying.

MARY FISHER, DIFFIE'S WIFE: I came across Whit in the bedroom with his head in his hands, and I said what? You know, what is the matter? And he said, I'm never going to amount to the anything, I'm just a broken-down old researcher. You really ought to find somebody else.

HOPKINS (on camera): And then two weeks later.

FISHER: And I'm really, because I actually, I said to him, listen, you're a great man. The world has yet to notice it, but that's the world's problem. But two weeks later, I came home from work and Whit met me at the top of stairs with a funny look on his face. He met me at the door, and then he said, "I believe I have made a great discovery."

HOPKINS (voice-over): Diffie, along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle, solved a problem of conventional cryptography. If Bob wants to send Alice an encrypted message that she can decipher, they must exchange a secret code, called a key, before he sends the message. Think of it as both exchanging one key that both locks a door and opens it. Exchanging that secret key, say by registered mail, is slow, costly and impractical if Bob wants to send encrypted messages to thousands of people. Diffie's revelation, both Bob and Alice have two keys: one private, one public. Bob finds Alice's public key in a directory and uses it to encipher a message, or lock the door, but for complex mathematical reasons, Alice's public key will not open the door, and only Alice holds the private key necessary to read the message, or open the door.

DIFFIE: Marty Hellman and I solved the problem that Ralph Merkle posed, which is stated as two people are communicating. I now like to think of it in the presence of observers, just the way there are lots of negotiations. There are people who speak and a whole bunch of other people who just sit and observe, and this is a method whereby you and I can sit and negotiate. And at the end of negotiation, we know something that we have negotiated, and none of the observers know what it is, even though they heard every bid and every response. It's kind of like a perfect technique for bidding in bridge.

HOPKINS: Almost perfect. The Diffie-Hellman system had one flaw: If everyone knows Alice's public key, she has no way to be sure that Bob sent her the message. It could have been Bob's enemy Hal posing as Bob. That problem was solved by a trio of MIT researchers, who later formed the company RSA. One of the of the company's founders is Ron Rivest. He calls Diffie a visionary.

RONALD RIVEST, CO-FOUNDER, RSA SECURITY: His work was the seminal inspiration for this company. His paper with Marty Hellman gave the idea of public cryptography, laid it out, you know, and said here's a nice technical problem with important social consequences and utility, and Artie and Len and I and I picked up on that said, you know, maybe we can contribute some technical ideas to make that peaceable and workable. We were able to do that, and that was the origin of the company in the end.

HOPKINS (on camera): You came up with a great idea that a lot of people are using, but you haven't benefited, in that you haven't started a company that's gone public and...

RIVEST: I haven't started a company, but I think I've done pretty well. I mean, I know people who, you know, had ideas and had patents and things, and gone around trying to exploit their patents and start companies that will brandish their patents and so forth, and it's -- after a while, I realized, so to speak, I marketed my discovery better than a lot of people. Maybe I didn't market it as well as RSA did, but it is the basis for all the work, all of the of the jobs I've had and the work I've been able to do because of -- and in fact, the support I've gotten.

HOPKINS (voice-over): One of Diffie's biggest backers is Jim Bidzos, the man who turned RSA into a successful business. He credits Diffie with educating him about the ins and outs of cryptography. In fact, Bidzos gave Diffie large chunks of stock in RSA. In 1996, RSA was bought by a public company, and Diffie became a millionaire, an eccentric millionaire whom Bidzos calls strange, weird, different. JIM BIDZOS, VICE CHAIRMAN, RSA SECURITY: Whit had this great interest in knives, and one day, we were having lunch, and Whit was sitting across from the third fellow who was having lunch with us, and Whit just kept staring at his sandwich constantly, nonstop, and staring at it intently. He seemed to be absorbing the conversation, and making acknowledging grunts every now and then, but his attention was really focused on the sandwich. And then all of a sudden, he produced this giant lockback knife, flipped open the blade without ever taking his eyes off the sandwich, just simply reached over and whacked a piece off and tasted it, and seemed to be really enjoying tasting it. I thought that was a little unusual.

HOPKINS: Why Whit Diffie has a special pocket sewn in his suits, and the animal his wife had in her pocket when they met, next on MOVERS.

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DIFFIE: We live in a global economy. The major U.S. corporations are reluctant to deploy...

HOPKINS (voice-over): Whitfield Diffie loves the limelight. In February, he played to the cameras after a White House meeting on cybersecurity.

DIFFIE: What we saw was a whole lot of computers taken over, and what I said to the president that resonated with him is that this isn't though you've lost an election, because a lot of people voted against you, and they didn't even know they'd voted; somebody voted for them.

HOPKINS: One participant called Diffie the star of the show. President Clinton met with Diffie and other technology industry executives following hacker attacks on some of the Internet's most popular Web sites.

DIFFIE: This meeting occurred at a very attractive time, because we are the beneficiaries of a change in export policy, which is going to make this job, on the industry's part, a lot easier.

HOPKINS: Diffie was referring to the Clinton administration's December decision to life most export restrictions on powerful encryption software. The policy shift is a major victory for Diffie, other privacy advocates and to U.S. companies that sell computers that sell computer-security products.

HOPKINS (on camera): Do you love the debate of politics? Do you like the policy part of politics?

DIFFIE: I think -- I'm not sure exactly. I certainly do -- I mean, I'm a show-off. I certainly enjoy going on stage and lecturing and talking to Congress. That's a personality explanation. And given government proposals, I thought I had a clear view that they were antagonistic to human freedom.

HOPKINS (voice-over): Diffie's reputation as a freedom fighter took off in the early 1990s, after the introduction of the clipper chip. The clipper chip gave the government a way to decipher encrypted communications to the horror of privacy advocates and most businesses. Diffie testified against clipper before a Senate committee, and landed on the cover of "The New York Times Magazine."

Arguing for clipper was John McConnell, then director of the National Security Agency.

JOHN M. MCCONNELL, FMR. NSA DIRECTOR: Whit Diffie is a very tough opponent. He's a brilliant guy. His mind works at lightning speed. He needs -- he's thought these issues through in much more detail than most people, and so, having given it so much deliberate thought and being so quick, he was a very worthy opponent. I gave it my best argument. I'm not sure I came out on the top of the of the debate.

HOPKINS: Clipper was adopted as a standard, but flopped. Diffie's historical role in the debate between privacy advocates and the government is somewhat ironic. As a child growing up in New York, Diffie wanted nothing to do with history. His father was a professor of Latin-American his trip and his mother studied French history.

DIFFIE: I think I was in a rebellion young against history at that time. 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.

HOPKINS (on camera): Was there something in school that got you interested in cryptography? Is that something that you were interested in at a really young age?

DIFFIE: Well, when I was 10, when I was in the fifth grade, I had a teacher named Mary Collins who spent one afternoon teaching us about simple substitutions, and I had a brief interest in the subject, and my father brought me all the books in the City College library.

HOPKINS (voice-over): Diffie graduated from MIT in 1965 with a degree in mathematics. He says his early fascination with cryptography reignited as he became interested in personal privacy.

(on camera): And what did that come out of?

DIFFIE: Common sense. In the '60s, I was working at the artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT, and of course that was the era of, you know, street politics and the opposition of the war in Vietnam and a whole range of things, and I was as very conscious of the needs of the individual for protection from the state.

HOPKINS (voice-over): That consciousness led to Diffie's work on cryptography at Stanford for the in the early '70s, and ultimately, to his discovery up public-key cryptography. Diffie says that wouldn't have happened without his wife, Mary. There's there's was not love at first sight.

FISHER: This was instant hate. We hated each other on sight. I'm sorry. We were this a hardware store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I had a squirrel in my pocket

HOPKINS (on camera): A squirrel in my pocket.

FISHER: Right. And he had a length of wire over his shoulder, and I was buying caging material for some exotic animals that I was taking care of, and he intruded upon this process and said...

DIFFIE: Can I put your squirrel in my wine?

FISHER: No, he didn't say "my squirrel." The squirrel was in hiding at the moment. He said, "oh cage clamps, hardware cloth, caging material -- sound like you have an exotic animal? What have you got? I have a geneta geneta (ph), and he started sort of taking things out of my hands and talking to my aggressively, and I began backing away more and more, and I began to think of him as a terrible problem.

HOPKINS (voice-over): Whit Diffie's morning rituals and what he's worried about now, when MOVERS returns.

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HOPKINS (voice-over): Whit Diffie used to be a night owl, working and thinking all true the night.

DIFFIE: I see the well-lived life as a proper harmony between fantasy and reality, and I imagine, you know, an imaginary communion with the other scholars who are sitting up thinking in the middle of the night.

HOPKINS: But these days, the 55-year-old cryptographer is an early bird. By 7:30, you can usually find him drinking cappucino, eating almond croissants and thinking.

DIFFIE: Intellectual work is essentially a lonely process, and if you can find a way of doing something so that you're in company without being disturbed, that, for me, is the critical thing. I often get to feel isolated so often if I'm sitting either where there aren't people or isn't a view.

HOPKINS: Diffie's schedule isn't the only thing that's changed with age. His '60s-era distrust of the government's intelligence community has given way to what he calls a more complex attitude, a more moderate style.

DIFFIE: Somebody said of said British politician, he's been sitting on the fence so long, the iron has entered his soul. I feel that way. On one hand, I was invited to give the eulogy at the dedication of the of the Frank Roulette (ph) Building at NSA, and I'm often welcome down there. On the other hand, I've argued positions very much opposed to positions of theirs.

HOPKINS (on camera): And you're working for a corporation now?

DIFFIE: And I'm working for a corporation for whom the government is a major customer, yes. So I'm not...

HOPKINS: So it's complicated.

DIFFIE: Right, it's complicated, but the fact is, I think, you know, you can never tell how your views, how much your views are independent of the circumstances you find yourself in.

HOPKINS: In the digital age, what should we as individual consumers be concerned about. What should we worry about?

DIFFIE: Well, what worries me is that the response to the concerns about privacy may have disastrous results. I think that to protect privacy by making somebody the censor who determines what the flow of information will be is not going to promote a free society. I see the direction of intellectual property law as very likely giving people control over information in ways that makes the debate that's essential to a free society impossible.

HOPKINS (voice-over): Diffie may be preoccupied with modern-day issues, but he remains attached to the tools of the of the past.

DIFFIE: I actually had a pocket tailored into my suits for carrying chopsticks in a case.

HOPKINS: Diffie's care also harks back to the past, and adds to his folk hero status among privacy advocates and cryptographers.

Whitfield Diffie, a mover who's brilliance changed the face of cryptography and who's views continue to illuminate the debate about the role of privacy in our lives.

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