Cryptography pioneer Whit Diffie joins Internet domain name agency, will advise on security

Cryptography pioneer Whit Diffie joins ICANN staff

NEW YORK — Cryptography pioneer Whit Diffie has joined the staff of the Internet’s key oversight agency for domain names.

As vice president for information security and cryptography, Diffie will provide general advice on security and help manage networks operated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.

Diffie, 65, previously served as vice president and chief security officer at Sun Microsystems Inc., where he worked from 1991 to 2009, just before Oracle Corp. took over Sun.

A paper Diffie co-wrote in 1976 advanced computer scientists’ understanding of how to deal with the mathematical keys required for unscrambling sensitive messages.

ICANN is in the midst of pushing security improvements in the domain name system, a network of thousands of servers around the world that tell computers how to locate specific websites. Because of the system’s decentralized nature, hackers have many potential launching points for attacks that, for instance, could land you at a scam website instead of your bank’s site.

While ICANN does not run many of these domain name servers directly, it can press for the use of a security protocol that is meant to verify that the directory information is authentic. The technology uses mathematical techniques similar to encryption.

Diffie declined an interview request Friday, but he said in an e-mail that the security challenges facing ICANN and the domain system are very similar to those facing the Internet as a whole.