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Issue 2.11 | Nov 1994

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Prophet of Privacy (continued)

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Compared to ordinary encryption, public key is a type of magic. By splitting the scrambling-and-descrambling "key" into two components, a widely distributed public key and a closely held private key, it enables users to communicate in complete secrecy with people they've never met. And when that person replies, only the user will be able to read that message. Even more remarkable, it makes possible a "digital signature," assuring that an electronic message was generated by the person who claims responsibility for it. Together, these features allow us to create new forms of digital commerce with an unprecedented level of privacy. These possibilities also present a challenge to government, particularly to the NSA, which is accustomed to controlling the nation's cryptosystems. As cryptography slips into the mainstream, the agency is faced with a dramatic reassessment of its mission.

And looking over the agency's shoulder is Whit Diffie, who has emerged as a passionate and public critic of government cryptographic policy. His eloquence alone would make him a formidable figure in the debate over whether the feds should limit the spread of crypto, but his credentials make him a figure truly to be reckoned with. "I would say he is the elder statesman of cryptography," says Jim Bidzos, president of RSA Data Security. "Few people have the kind of insights he does."

Yet at one time, it looked like Diffie might slip into obscurity as an eccentric hacker who never made much of his genius for math and his laser-focus mind. As his wife tells it, on the very eve of the historic discovery of public key crypto, Diffie was virtually despondent. "He was telling me that he should do something else," recalls Mary Fischer, "that he was a broken-down researcher."

This was 1975. Diffie was 31, with only a bachelor's degree, and he had reached a point in life where, he says, "I was worried that I wasn't particularly remarkable as a programmer and that my lot in life would get progressively worse if things continued going as they were." All his life Diffie had jigged in perfect cadence to an internal tune, heeding little of convention. Had the music led him to a dead end?

Whit Diffie, it seems, had always been different. Born in 1944, he was the sole offspring of Bailey Wallace Diffie and Justine Louise Whitfield. They had met as foreign service workers in Madrid in the 1920s and married in Paris in 1928. Diffie senior became a City College of New York history professor specializing in Iberia and its colonies, and Whit grew up in Queens, in perhaps the only atheist Camelite household in a mostly Jewish neighborhood. "One of Whit's oldest friends told me he had an alternative lifestyle at age 5," says Mary Fischer.

Diffie didn't learn to read until he was 10 years old. There was no question of disability; it was obvious he was a bright, curious child. He simply didn't read, and no one considered it a horrible problem. During the fifth grade he spontaneously worked his way through a tome called The Space Cat and immediately progressed to one of the Wizard of Oz books. Later that year, his teacher at PS 78 - "Her name was Mary E. Collins and if she is still alive I would like to find her," says Diffie - spent an afternoon on the subject of ciphers, and Diffie was so taken he had his father check out all the cryptography books in the City College library. But his code mania soon faded, and he pursued other interests - castles, camouflage rockets, and poison gases. (As late as his junior year in high school, he considered a career in the military.) Diffie also became interested in math - "I thought of myself as a mathematician in high school," he says.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he harbored contempt for computers - he thought himself too pure a mathematician to have much truck with them. This began to change after he earned his degree in 1965. The Vietnam War dampened Diffie's military enthusiasm, and he became a self-described "peacenik," with no desire to deploy the armed rockets and poison gases that had entranced him in his youth. Like many, he found a way to avoid the draft - working for a defense contractor. It was the Mitre Corporation, a Massachusetts systems engineering company that worked for the Defense Department. The job was a plum - while technically a Mitre employee, he would write LISP code at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. There Diffie was exposed to the best computer hackers in the world. By the time he left Mitre in 1969, Diffie was over his contempt for computers.

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