Whitfield Diffie

"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."

"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."

"If you depend on a secret for your security, what do you do when the secret is discovered? If it is easy to change, like a cryptographic key, you do so. If it's hard to change, like a cryptographic system or an operating system, you're stuck. You will be vulnerable until you invest the time and money to design another system."

"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."

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