Whitfield Diffie Quotes

Some people make sharp distinctions sort of between their recreational musings and their professional work. I don’t make that distinction very much.

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

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 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.

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 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 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.

If you have ambition, you might not achieve anything, but without ambition, you are almost certain not to achieve anything.

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.

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

People constantly face problems they’ve never seen before, and they have to solve them somehow. So a million people come up with a million solutions that are just a little bit different. If computing is being done by fewer resources, there will be enormous security gains by pushing things into standard practices.

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.

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.

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

People are leaving trails everywhere they go; automated web crawlers tell you an awful lot about their social activities. The flow of information in fundamentally unobtrusive ways into social control organisations has risen dramatically.

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.

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.

I liked Berkeley tremendously, Berkeley was a very leftist campus. I came to love that city as much as I love Paris or the south of France or New York.

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

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.

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

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.

I think, and I’ve thought this for a long time, that we live, roughly speaking, in the last generation of human beings.

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 am not convinced that lack of encryption is the primary problem. The problem with the Internet is that it is meant for communications among non-friends.