Lincoln Lab

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY – Bailey Whitfield "Whit" Diffie first heard about the applications of computational work-based cryptographic methods from Alan Tritter at IBM's Thomas J. Watson laboratory, when he met with him and other members of the company's cryptography research team over a weekend in 1974. Diffie was nearing the end of his sojourn across the United States, which semi-official crypto biographer Steven Levy paints as the romantic adventure of an eccentric genius, whose "libertarian ethic" drove him to scour the country in search of the best way to achieve cryptographic privacy.