Whitfield Diffie on the History of Cryptography

Mr Obnoxious - Un pódcast de Peter McCormack

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Interview location: Palo Alto
Interview date: Thursday 31st Jan, 2018
Company: Cryptomathic
Role: Cryptographer and Security Expert

A number of pioneers developed the cryptographic and technical foundations for which Bitcoin is built upon. Nick Szabo highlighted a number of these people in his Tweet:

“Inventors of the most important technologies in Bitcoin: digital signatures and Merkle trees (Merkle), elliptic curve crypto (Koblitz), malicious-fault-tolerant consensus (Lamport), elliptic curve crypto (independent inventor: Miller).”

Many others along the way have contributed to the success of Bitcoin, either through early work or attempts at created a digital currency, names such as Adam Back, David Chaum and Szabo himself.

Whitfield Diffie sits alongside all of these people. His work on cryptography should not be forgotten in the history of Bitcoin and I had the pleasure of sitting down with him to discuss this, how he was introduced to Bitcoin and other such topics as privacy and security.

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Timestamps:

00.03.09: Intro and welcome
00.03.48: The father of cryptography
00.04.46: Cryptography third wave with cryptocurrencies
00.05.44: Whit’s back story
00.07.44: The journey to become a cryptographer
00.18.14: Understanding cryptography
00.25.16: Early thoughts of money with cryptography
00.28.12: The centralisation problem with digital currencies
00.30.51: Whit’s exposure to Bitcoin
00.36.19: Where we use cryptography
00.39.55: Privacy
00.43.29: Thoughts on the evolution of technology
00.47.10: Cryptography and world security
00.56.27: Quantum computing
00.59.14: Significant unsolved problems in cryptography

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Helpful Links:

Connect with Whitfield:
- On Wikipedia
- The Stamford Website

Mentioned in the interview:
- Homomorphic encryption
- D Day
- Proof of correctness of programmes
- Key escrow
- Whitfield Turing Award
- Key distribution
- Digicash
- Cypherpunks
- Transport Layer Security

Other relevant WBD podcasts:
- WBD047: Adam Back on a Decade of Bitcoin
- WBD043: Dan Held on Bitcoin's Immaculate Conception

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