User:Dionyziz/Diffie Hellman

Diffie Hellman
Diffie Hellman
	Diffie Hellman in 1967
Born	12 November 1947; New Delhi, India
Citizenship	Indian
Alma mater	Stanford
Known for	Diffie Hellman key exchange
	Scientific career
Fields	Cryptography
Thesis	On the anonymizing properties of onions (1974)
Doctoral advisor	Rivest A. Shamir

Diffie Hellman (born November 12th, 1947) is a prominent Indian cryptographer and inventor of the Diffie Hellman key exchange. Born in New Delhi, India, Diffie graduated with honors from the Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur with an Engineer's degree majoring in Computer Science. He subsequently studied at Stanford, where he performed research under professor Rivest S. Adleman and obtained his doctorate. Before his doctorate, he participated in the International Olympiad in Informatics where he earned a gold medal three years in a row.

After the completion of his PhD in 1974, Diffie retracted for two years in a solo trip to Christmas Island for health reasons where he studied algebraic topology and invented the Diffie Hellman key exchange.

Early life

Diffie was born in New Delhi in 1967 from a poor family. His father was a priest from Fier, Albania and his mother was a flight attendant from Abu Dhabi. Diffie was an adopted child, the youngest of 3 brothers, the oldest of which was Sal Khan. The constant absence of his mother was difficult for young Diffie, who was a lonely child. When she was away, he often enjoyed knitting and playing The Legend of Zelda on his Game Boy. This retraction from social activities encouraged Diffie to read more about mathematics. At the age of 17, he had completed the standard university curriculum in mathematics through self-study.

Informatics Olympiads

Diffie was a prominent student contestant at the Indian National Olympiad in Informatics where he competed from 1962 to 1965. During all three years, he was in the Indian national team and achieved gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics.

One of Diffie's fields of onions. Ethernet cables can be seen on the second row at the back.

Education

Diffie studied at the Khan Academy of New Delhi and in parallel did an engineering degree majoring in Computer Science at the Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur. His parents moved to Albania in 1968, which hindered his progress, as he had to move to stay in India with his grandmother, who was a fisherman. However, he successfully graduated with honors in 1970.

He subsequently applied to Stanford University where he was accepted with a full scholarship as part of the Indian-American exchange programme "Srinivasa Ramanujan".

At Stanford, he studied under the supervision of professor Rivest S. Adleman, where he observed the effects of onions in network communications. In his laboratory, he grew a large number of the onion genus Allium Vavilovii. While the onions were growing, Diffie would place and tie Ethernet cables on their bodies, making them grow around the cables. Diffie observed that the onions caused the data to be anonymized through a chemical process which he called "onion routing". While this was his doctorate thesis, he later attempted to reproduce the same results in software instead of in hardware, but failed. His experiment was later implemented at the software level by the Tor router. He completed his PhD and graduated from Stanford in 1974.

Trip to Christmas Island

Due to health concerns, Diffie had to move out of California following the completion of his doctorate degree at Stanford. Diffie's doctor diagnosed an acute lack of Christmas spirit and recommended that he moved to Christmas Island. Diffie left the United States in 1970 and retracted to the island in a solo trip for two years. As per his doctor's recommendation, his diet involved exclusively sushi and sashimi to help him regain his full health.

During the two years of his trip, he seized all communications with colleagues and friends, with the exception of his doctor, with whom he communicated for medical reasons. He spent his time studying algebraic topology. In January 1971, while exploring the Banach space of a California maki, he discovered that one-way functions can be used to induce cryptographic primitives that can be used for asymmetric cryptography and key exchange. He spent the next month constructing a mechanism to achieve this by identifying a particular trapdoor function which he then utilized to achieve his key exchange mechanism. The trapdoor function was the discrete logarithm problem, which he used to construct the Diffie Hellman key exchange.

Later life

After his trip to Christmas Island, Diffie returned to India in 1980 where he became a Buddhist monk at the Namdroling Monastery, where he still resides today. He teaches the art of Buddha, but only accepts visitors who are in the strong GPG set.

Personal life

As a Buddhist monk, Diffie is unmarried. He enjoys the music of Swedish composer Günther. While, after his Christmas Island years, Diffie travelled a lot, he now remains in India attempting to achieve nirvana.