Convening to Act

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 from positions as head of security for the Canadian telephone system and Sun Microsystems, Diffie is now an Honorary Fellow of Gonville and
Caius College in Cambridge. He is a member of the National Academy of
Engineering, the Royal Society, and NSA's Cryptologic Hall of Honor.