Whitfield Diffie Quotes

I thought cryptography was a technique that did not require your trusting other people-that if you encrypted your files, you would have the control to make the choice as to whether you would surrender your files.

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.

We have experienced an utter explosion in investigative techniques. Walk the streets, look at the cameras! They are now recognising people automatically from photos; we have DNA fingerprinting, infrascan photos that can identify you from the veins in your face.

People meet in bars after work all over the world and talk about the great problems of life and death and the world and politics and they don't take themselves seriously. They can do nothing else except chat about these things in bars after work.

The decisions we make about communication security today will determine the kind of society we live in tomorrow.

It isn't that secrets are never needed in security. It's that they are never desirable.

I guess, in a very real sense, I'm a Gnostic. I had been looking all my life for some great mystery ... I think somewhere deep in my mind is the notion that if I could learn just the right thing, I would be saved.

Two people can work on a problem better than one.

If you are designing cryptosystems, you've got to think about long-term applications. You've got to try to figure out how to build something that is secure against technology in the next century that you cannot even imagine.

I understood the importance in principle of public key cryptography but it's all moved much faster than I expected. I did not expect it to be a mainstay of advanced communications technology.

I think that the people who are trying to shut down WikiLeaks are going to have to accept this as a fact of reality that cryptography allows you to do this kind of thing.

Without strong encryption, you will be spied on systematically by lots of people.

I thought of computers as very low class. I thought of myself as a pure mathematician and was interested in partial differential equations and topology and things like that.

I have been working on two problems for three years: one of them for 8 or 9 years, and one of them for 3, 4, 5 years.

I really believe in the radical viewpoint. And I have always believed that one's politics and the character of his particular work are inseparable.

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.

I have always believed the thesis that one's politics and the character of one's intellectual work are inseparable.

In a sense, communications networks can be defined entirely by who has cryptographic keys, and I think a lot of networks will work that way in the future.

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.

Cloud computing means you are doing your computing on somebody else's computer. Looking ahead a little, I firmly believe cloud - previously called grid computing - will become very widespread. It's much cheaper than buying your own computing infrastructure, or maybe you don't have the power to do what you want on your own computer.

Cloud computing is a challenge to security, but one that can be overcome.

The most important impact of technology on communications security is that it draws better and better traffic into vulnerable channels.

If you depend on a secret for your security, what do you do when the secret is discovered? If it is easy to change, like a cryptographic key, you do so. If it's hard to change, like a cryptographic system or an operating system, you're stuck. You will be vulnerable until you invest the time and money to design another system.

It's simply unrealistic to depend on secrecy for security in computer software. You may be able to keep the exact workings of the program out of general circulation, but can you prevent the code from being reverse-engineered by serious opponents? Probably not. The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets.

We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions.