Thread by @ozm

Meet Whit Diffie, the man who invented public key cryptography.

This is the untold story of the man that made mainstream encryption possible. read.medium.com/UOFJD7Q

In honor of longtime tech journalist @StevenLevy’s new book, 'Facebook: The Inside Story,' we share an excerpt of an earlier Levy book, ‘Crypto.’

It’s about a man who ran in the opposite direction of Facebook’s data exploitation and privacy breaches. read.medium.com/UOFJD7Q

"Diffie didn’t read until he was 10 years old. There was no question of disability, he simply preferred that his parents read to him, which seemingly they did, quite patiently."

read.medium.com/UOFJD7Q

Stratospheric test scores enabled him to enter @MIT in 1961 to study mathematics.

He took up computer programming (at first, Diffie now says, to get out of the draft) and eventually landed at Mitre Corporation as a defense contractor. read.medium.com/UOFJD7Q

Diffie eventually left Mitre, going to work at John McCarthy’s Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.

There, he was referred to Martin Hellman, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, who hired him as a part-time researcher. read.medium.com/UOFJD7Q

Here’s the big question that'd been bugging Diffie for years: Was it possible to use cryptography to protect a huge network against eavesdroppers, and wiretappers to boot?

How could you create a system where people who had never met could speak securely? read.medium.com/UOFJD7Q

One afternoon, things suddenly became clear.

He would split the key.

"Diffie’s breakthrough itself involved something that, in the context of the history of cryptography, seemed an absolute heresy: a public key.”

Read the full excerpt here. 👇

read.medium.com/UOFJD7Q