Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie ForMemRS (born June 5, 1944) is an American cryptographer and mathematician and one of the pioneers of public-key cryptography along with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle.

[8] His interest in cryptography began at "age 10 when his father, a professor, brought home the entire crypto shelf of the City College Library in New York".

[9] During the first two years of his undergraduate studies at MIT, he felt unengaged and seriously considered transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, where he perceived as a more hospitable academic environment.

As the most current research in the field during the epoch fell under the classified oversight of the National Security Agency, Diffie "went around doing one of the things I am good at, which is digging up rare manuscripts in libraries, driving around, visiting friends at universities."

While group director Alan Konheim "couldn't tell [Diffie] very much because of a secrecy order," he advised him to meet with Martin Hellman, a young electrical engineering professor at Stanford University who was also pursuing a cryptographic research program.

[12] In 1975–76, Diffie and Hellman criticized the NBS proposed Data Encryption Standard, largely because its 56-bit key length was too short to prevent brute-force attack.

[16] In May 2010, Diffie joined the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as vice president for information security and cryptography, a position he left in October 2012.

[17] Diffie is a member of the technical advisory boards of BlackRidge Technology, and Cryptomathic where he collaborates with researchers such as Vincent Rijmen, Ivan Damgård and Peter Landrock.

They published their results in 1976—solving one of the fundamental problems of cryptography, key distribution—and essentially broke the monopoly that had previously existed where government entities controlled cryptographic technology and the terms on which other individuals could have access to it.

... Every company, every citizen now had routine access to the sorts of cryptographic technology that not many years ago ranked alongside the atom bomb as a source of power.

[25] In 2011, Diffie was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for his work, with Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle, on public key cryptography.