Whitfield Diffie, ForMemRS
Honorary Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
Whitfield Diffie is best known for pioneering public-key cryptography in the early 1970s. Before his 1976 paper New Directions in Cryptography, written with Martin Hellman, encryption technology was primarily the domain of governments. Public-key cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman key negotiation protocol made cryptography scalable to the Internet and revolutionized the landscape of security. For this work, Diffie and Hellman shared the 2015 ACM Turing Award. Whitfield is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and in 2020 was inducted into the Cryptologic Hall of Honor of the U.S. National Security Agency.