Whitfield Diffie is best known for his discovery of the concept of public-key cryptography, which he developed jointly with Martin Hellman at Stanford University in the mid-1970s. The two shared the ACM Turing Award in 2015 for work that "made cryptography scalable to the Internet and revolutionized the landscape of security.'’ Retired as head of security for both the Canadian telephone system and Sun Microsystems, Diffie is now an Honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, England. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society and the NSA's Cryptologic Hall of Honor.
