SUN ENGINEER RECEIVES INTERNATIONAL AWARD; FOUNDED NEW FIELD OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- January 13, 1993 -- Whitfield Diffie, 48, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation (SMCC), was recently awarded the degree of Doctor of Technical Sciences, Honoris Causa, by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. The award was given for founding a new field of scientific research, public key cryptography, which grew out of discoveries Diffie made at Stanford University in 1975. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, or ETH after the initials of its German name, is one of the most prestigious technical universities in the world. It counts among its alumni some of the foremost scientists of the 20th century, including Albert Einstein and John VonNeuman. Doctorates "by reason of honor" make up less than one tenth of the total number of doctoral degrees awarded by the ETH. They are granted for major scientific or engineering achievements and are given only after a nomination and review process taking two to three years. In conventional cryptography, encrypting and decrypting messages were inseparable; anyone who could create an encrypted message could also read it and vice versa. By separating these functions, public key cryptography allows people to guarantee the privacy of conversations with people they have never met before and to apply unforgeable "digital signatures" to their messages. In Diffie's words: it does what signatures and envelopes do for ordinary mail. At the time Diffie began his work in cryptography, he was one of only a handful of people not employed by government intelligence agencies who took a serious interest in the field. Today, the International Association for Cryptologic Research, of which he is one of the founding directors, has hundreds of members from industry and academia worldwide. Diffie joined Sun in the summer of 1991 with the title of Distinguished Engineer, although one of his inventions had already been used in the company's security products since 1987. In hiring Diffie, Sun recognized both the rising importance of security in computer communications and the critical role of cryptography in achieving that security. In the latest Sun(TM) Solaris(R) operating system, the original "secure RPC" has been improved, while more comprehensive applications of cryptography are planned for future versions of Solaris. Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation (SMCC) is the world's leading supplier of open client-server computing solutions. With headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., SMCC is an operating company of Sun Microsystems, Inc. ### Sun Microsystems, Sun Microsystems Computer Corp., Sun, the Sun logo, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Solaris is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.