Father of Cryptography: Whitfield Diffie Interview

Boxmining

14.3K views 483 6 years ago

Description

I was very fortunate to be able to interview Whitfield Diffie, inventor of public key cryptography and 2015 Turing Award winner. In this interview, we cover a wide range of topics and hear his thought...

I was very fortunate to be able to interview Whitfield Diffie, inventor of public key cryptography and 2015 Turing Award winner. In this interview, we cover a wide range of topics and hear his thoughts on blockchain, changes in cryptography, quantum computing, and more. 0:46 Whitfield Diffie and changes in cryptography 2:25 His introduction to blockchain 3:25 Cryptic Labs and NKN 4:17 Quantum computing and crypto 8:27 How did he come up with public-key cryptography 10:42 Public-key cryptography and blockchain 12:03 The future of blockchain 👍🏻Subscribe to Boxmining for Daily CryptoNews and Altcoin explainers: https://www.youtube.com/c/boxmining #Cryptography #Blockchain #Diffie 👑Recommended Exchange - Binance: https://goo.gl/joe55C 🔒Hardware Wallet: https://www.ledgerwallet.com/r/428b 📲Mobile Wallet: https://enjinwallet.io/ Brave Browser: https://brave.com/box831 ●▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬● Telegram groups: Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/boxminingChannel Telegram Announcements: https://t.me/boxminingChannel ●▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬● ♨️Social: Steemit: https://steemit.com/@boxmining Twitter: https://twitter.com/boxmining Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/boxmining ●▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬● I'm not a professional financial adviser and you should always do your own research. I may hold the cryptocurrencies talked about in the video. ●▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬●

AI Analysis

The renowned cryptographer Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor of public-key cryptography and a Turing Award winner, shares his insights on the evolving landscape of cryptography, the rise of blockchain technology, and the potential impact of quantum computing. He reflects on the explosive growth of both public-key cryptography and the current blockchain space, drawing parallels between the two booms and discussing the business and societal implications of these groundbreaking technologies.

Here are the key takeaways from the discussion:

* The Explosive Growth of Cryptography and Blockchain:
* The current boom in the blockchain space feels very similar to the rapid expansion of the RSA show around 1997, where the field suddenly grew from hundreds to thousands of people and became a massive business.
* Initially, Diffie viewed cryptography as a technology and a political phenomenon, but he didn't fully grasp the immense business infrastructure required to achieve the technical ambitions he imagined, particularly for its widespread adoption across millions of devices. He's seeing a similar explosion of effort and investment in the blockchain space now.
* Public-key cryptography is now an essential ingredient in the security of internet commerce, underpinning technologies like HTTPS.

* His Introduction to Blockchain and a Missed Opportunity:
Diffie expresses "embarrassment" for missing the early opportunities with Bitcoin. Around six or seven years prior, a New York Times* reporter, John Markoff, introduced him to Bitcoin and shared the whitepaper.
* He was fascinated by the concept of Bitcoin mining as an investment akin to gold prospecting but regrettably failed to realize he could have simply downloaded the code and mined Bitcoin himself, joking that he "could be retired by now."

* Involvement with Cryptic Labs and NKN:
* Diffie is involved with Cryptic Labs, an organization that conducts sponsored applied research in cryptography, with a focus on blockchain but not exclusively.
* NKN (New Kind of Network) is one of Cryptic Labs' clients. Diffie's specific contributions to NKN are confidential at the moment, as some information is under non-disclosure agreements awaiting publication.

* The Quantum Computing Threat to Cryptography:
* He believes quantum computing will eventually come, citing the significant investment by major tech companies like Intel, Microsoft, Google, and IBM into building quantum processors.
* While acknowledging the promise, he's skeptical about its immediate practical capabilities, noting that current quantum computers are still mostly demonstrating the ability to factor small numbers like 15. There's nothing yet close to what's needed to break real-world encryption.
* Shor's algorithm, designed for quantum computers, poses a significant threat to current public-key crypto systems like Diffie-Hellman and RSA because it can efficiently find "hidden cycles" in mathematical transformations, which these systems rely on to conceal information.
* One potential countermeasure is scaling up current encryption key sizes (e.g., from 2,000-3,000 bits to 10,000 bits or more), but it's unclear how effective this will be against future, more powerful quantum computers.
* Other "larger and slower" cryptographic techniques are known to be less vulnerable to quantum attacks.
* He imagines a future scenario where you might have a very long, perhaps one-minute, call with a service like Amazon once a year to negotiate a key, which you then cache and use for the rest of the year.
* Diffie suggests that if quantum computing truly delivers on its promise, its impact on engineering and other fields will be so vast that any disruption to cryptography might seem minor in comparison.

* The Genesis of Public-Key Cryptography:
* His initial motivation was to "clean up" cryptography and provide a sound mathematical basis for proving system security, though he realized he couldn't solve that directly.
* The breakthrough came from combining two distinct concepts: "identification friend or foe" (IFF) systems, which change passwords with every challenge to prevent "shoulder surfing," and "one-way ciphers" used in password tables, where the password itself isn't stored, only a transformed version.
* Putting these two ideas together led to the concept of digital signatures, where a "signer" can solve a problem that a "verifier" can then confirm.
* About a week later, he realized this core idea could be "turned around" to solve the long-standing problem of securely negotiating keys between parties who had no prior shared secret, thus giving birth to public-key cryptography.

* Public-Key Cryptography's Unforeseen Applications and the Future of Blockchain:
* He explicitly states he never imagined public-key cryptography would be used for something like blockchain or Bitcoin. His original focus was on secure communication, such as secure mail, phones, and inter-office memos in a "paperless office" environment.
* He notes that pioneers like David Chaum, with his company DigiCash, were motivated by financial applications but never achieved the widespread adoption seen today.
* Diffie sees blockchain as the "first big contribution" to solving the challenge of decentralization, which was crucial for the widespread adoption of financial applications like Bitcoin.
* He acknowledges the innovative new applications evolving in the blockchain ecosystem, such as using tokens for community building, which are very different from the original financial applications.
* Comparing the current blockchain "hype" to the early internet, Diffie believes the internet was actually "underhyped" given its profound and ongoing impact on human society. He expects similar, unimaginable impacts from communication technologies, including blockchain, even if the specific roles of individual technologies are uncertain.

Transcript

The following video I'm going to show you is one of the most important interviews I've ever done, and that is with pioneer cryptographer Whitfield Diffie. Whitfield Diffie invented the Diffie-Hellman exchange, which pretty much started this revolution with asymmetrical cryptography, which is used in cryptocurrencies today. Pretty much all cryptocurrencies use it. So that's how important this guy is. In this video, we talk about what it took to get this invention into mass adoption, into every w...

The following video I'm going to show you is one of the most important interviews I've ever done, and that is with pioneer cryptographer Whitfield Diffie. Whitfield Diffie invented the Diffie-Hellman exchange, which pretty much started this revolution with asymmetrical cryptography, which is used in cryptocurrencies today. Pretty much all cryptocurrencies use it. So that's how important this guy is. In this video, we talk about what it took to get this invention into mass adoption, into every website, and then we talk about his views on cryptocurrencies on the blockchain, and finally the quantum threat that opposes to blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. I hope you guys enjoy this video and the insights that this legend offers. Hey guys, I'm here with American cryptographer Whitfield Diffie. So how do you find this field right now? So you've been in cryptography for a long time, and what do you see in this kind of blockchain space? I'm seeing this, I'm experiencing something for the second time. So in 1997 or so, when I went to the RSA show, suddenly it had gone from hundreds of people to thousands of people. Right. And I walked onto the show floor, and there's an acre or more of stuff. And I thought, you know, I knew this was important. I knew it was going to be big. I imagined millions of devices chattering at each other, but I never understood how many thousand people I had to be hustling to turn a buck to make it work. Right. And this, I'm having a feeling again, all of a sudden it's exploded again. Yeah. And it's like this conference is just going huge and bigger and bigger. And it requires a lot of effort. So with pushing cryptography forward as well, so what you said is you said it took a lot of effort, like a lot of people to hustle to do that. When I started out, I didn't understand cryptography as a business. I thought about cryptography as a technology, think cryptography as in some ways a political phenomenon, but I didn't think about how big a business this would have to become to achieve the things I imagined technically. Right. I mean, pretty much right now, the whole internet is based on public key cryptography. You've got HTTPS. And is that true? Well, it's an essential ingredient. I mean, I would say, you know, the whole internet is based on the IP protocol. That's right. But yes, public key cryptography plays, as far as I can see, an essential role in the security of internet commerce. Right, right. And how do you get introduced to the blockchain space? I mean... You know, that's a great embarrassment because about, what, six, seven years ago, we picked the right time. John Markoff, the New York Times, sat down with me at my usual cafe in Palo Alto, and he told me about Bitcoin. And he gave me this paper about Bitcoin. And I was fascinated primarily with the notion of Bitcoin mining as an issue of, you know, you can invest money and then you can mine something valuable, just the way you can invest money in prospecting and get yourself a gold pan and things like that. But for some reason, I missed the fact that I could just download those code. I could have downloaded, I could have mined Bitcoin myself. I could have done that. Yeah, you could have done that. And I didn't discover that, and so I could be retired by now. So in terms of what the projects you're working with, you're probably working with NKN right now. So what do you see there? Well, I'm working with NKN indirectly. Right. I'm with an outfit called Cryptic Labs, which does sponsored applied research in cryptography, with an emphasis on blockchain, but not an exclusion on blockchain. And one of our clients is NKN. So what are you doing there in that sense? How are you helping them with the cryptography? Well, you should ask them whether I'm helping or not. They have an idea about, as they call it, a new kind of network. And unfortunately, they've sent me all of these things, you know, Mark, do not disclose, that are going to be published, you know, soon or something like that. So I'm unclear what to say about their... Okay, so we'll keep it quiet for now. So in terms of, you know, one thing that's in crypto for a long time, I'm not sure if you're the best person to ask this, but you know, quantum computing is developing very quickly. Everyone's so worried about the quantum threat that it poses to, say, public key cryptography. What's your view on that? Well, okay. Whether there's going to be quantum computing is something you really need to ask a physicist. Right. And they've been promising us quantum computing for, you know, heaven knows how long at this point. And it's made in some sense, you know, how many bits worth they can do. It hasn't made a lot of progress. On the other hand, it is also clear to me that a lot of thinking has been done on the subject. And there is some reason that Intel, Microsoft, Google was another one, IBM... Yeah, they're all trying to build... ...are all trying to build quantum computers. The processor is a quantum computer. So I believe that's going to come along. And the idea of quantum computing is it solves Shor's algorithm, apparently. Or it's an algorithm that you can try to... It's an algorithm that finds hidden cycles. Right. Right. So in any transformation of a message space, you can keep transforming the message again and again and again and again. Romamu! Romamu! Romamu! Romamu! I've come to bargain! Eventually, you get back to something you've seen before. Right. But it might be hard to find out how long it is before that happens. That's what's at the heart of Diffie-Hellman and RSA, is being able to conceal the lengths of cycles. Right. And Shor's algorithm finds hidden cycles. Right. So it represents a significant threat to the current public e-crypto systems. And there are two possibilities. Right. And one is that that's sort of a limited threat because those exponential things can be scaled quite a distance. So Daniel Bernstein has, for his amusement, a billion-bit RSA modules. Okay. I don't think that's really a very practical object. Right. But the point is, we're using 2,000, 3,000 bits at the moment. We could scale to 10,000 bits or something. And camera finance cycles there, right? Well, that's why I don't know. That is, say, it depends on exactly how far the quantum computers can be scaled. But right now we don't have a practical. Well, right now we don't have a practical. They keep announcing they factored the number 15, right? Faster than anybody ever factored the number 15 before, right? I mean, there may be some slightly, I remember some talk about 50 or 51 qubits or something. Right. But the point is that it is anywhere right at this moment. You know, nothing that I know about is anywhere close to what's needed. No. But it could come on fairly sudden. Now, there are other techniques known that are not as vulnerable to quantum computing. However, they're all, so to speak, larger and slower. Right. So my interest in that direction is in part that you might find yourself with the need to cache keys, to do a key negotiation, and then keep the key around for somewhat longer. Right. And that, so I imagine a world which may be, you know, January 1st or 2nd, business day, you call up Amazon, and you have a one-minute long call in which you negotiate your key for the year. Right, and then you cache that key. And then you cache that, and you hold on to that key. Okay. Now, I just don't know whether that's what's coming, but that's one of the inconvenient things one can easily imagine. It's kind of scary because there's always a threat that's going to come, but then you never see them deliver. That's the biggest problem. Like, it's like... Well, all right. Sure, but that's, you know, if quantum computing comes through, it's going to deliver a lot more than an impact on cryptography. I mean, there's all sorts of engineering problems that will be amenable to this vast impact. And it might be sufficient so nobody would care what happened to cryptography. I mean, you know... It might be. While walking around the ceiling instead, you know? Maybe. So I have one last question. I think it always amuses me how kind of genius public key cryptography is. How did you come up with the idea? You know, like, what sparked you into that? Well, naturally, I get asked this a certain number of times. Roughly speaking, you know, like all mathematicians who got into cryptography, right? Essentially. I want to clean the subject up. Nobody knows for sure whether cryptosystems are secure. This just needs a sound mathematical basis. We're going to have systems that are going to prove they're secure. Well, it couldn't solve that problem, right? So I was sitting around and I couldn't solve that problem. I worked on other things, you know. Right. And one thing I was trying... What I was trying to do was to combine what's called identification friend or foe, which a fire control radar challenges an aircraft and says, you know, do you know how to encrypt my message and send it back to me? And I'll tell the gun to refrain from shooting at you. Right. And one-way ciphers as used in password tables, which protect you in... You know, the first thing, the IFF in more domestic terms protects you against shoulder surfing. If you type the same password all the time, somebody can watch and see you type the password. What IFF amounts to is the password changes all the time. And it sends you a challenge and you send back a reply that is... Okay, that has a different reply. Every time. Every time. And so... But there's another... a whole another problem, which is what's represented by passwords. That it's really, really convenient not to have the password table be secret. So you transform the password into something that's different. Okay. So the password tables... Anyway, you put those two things together and you have digital signature. Ah. And I realized that, you know, just because you could recognize the right solution to a problem didn't mean you could solve it. Right. And so the signer is able to solve a problem to verify or cancel. Right, right. And a week or so later, I realized that, my God, I've been thinking for a long time about how to negotiate keys between people who are not... Right. And this could be turned around to do that. Right. And that's... It's interesting. Did you ever see that it would be used for something like blockchain or Bitcoin or something like that? Well, of course I didn't see that it would be used for... Obviously, right? Oh, so you want to meet it? It's interesting to me. I was never terribly motivated by the direct sort of money applications. I kind of thought more in terms of secure mail, secure phones, secure communications. And I certainly thought in terms of signatures. I was imagining... I started this in 1970, I imagined a paperless office and I couldn't figure out for five years what you would do about signatures. Right. So this is... I was thinking more in terms of inter-office memos and letters and things of that kind. So the person who thought forever about financial applications was a man named David Chalm. He had a company called DigiCash and a whole lot... They never succeeded in making it catch on the way it's caught on now. Right. And so that's... I think the issue is how to make it decentralized and it seems to me the blockchain has been the first big contribution to that. Yeah. And it's so interesting how the ecosystem is developing because now they're talking about community building, using tokens to build a community and it's such a different application I guess from the original outset. So in terms of Dreamers and how you see this space, do you feel like we're pushing in the right direction? Do you think like there's too much being hyped up here or do you feel like it's just the right amount? Well, you know, I can't bring myself to quite the enthusiasm I expressed to... I was later CEO of Google. Where's Eric Schmidt? Eric Schmidt. He was talking at some event and whether... asking whether the internet was... asking rhetorically is the internet overhyped? and I opened screaming underhype, underhype. I mean, I think, you know, I think nobody can imagine the impact of communications on human society. We've seen 1% of it, a tenth of a percent of it, something. How individual things like, you know, public key or blockchain or something else will play into that, I don't know. But there's certainly a lot of room for action. Awesome. And I hope you enjoyed the conference and I hope you have a great talk today. Good. Cheers. Thank you much. Thank you.