Henry Ford once said that "If I had asked my customers what they want, they would have asked for a better horse." His statement poignantly illustrates the difference between continuous improvement and true innovation. 

At Revere, we adhere to both and nobody personifies these two aspects of entrepreneurial spirit better than Dr. Whitfield Diffie, our Chief Cryptographer. Whit did not build a better horse in 1976 when he invented PKI with Ralf Merkle and Peter Hellman. Instead these three scientists set out to create a cryptographic solution that enabled anonymous communication and enabled trust between any two parties in a transaction. At the time, of course, none of them were aware of its true impact, which was to enable electronic commerce and the Internet as we know it today. This is not to say that they just got lucky. On the contrary, these inspirational pioneers of cryptography followed their dreams and they did what simply felt right at the time. It is just that time proved them right in more ways than they had imagined. It showed that their beliefs and values have carried far beyond their circumstances in the year 1976.

 

Towards the end of the last decade, it was Dr. Diffie again along with Eric Smith and Peter Schweitzer who set out to invent an algorithm that they knew would be needed to protect critical infrastructure such as power grids, industrial manufacturing complexes and other advanced technological systems, which had been unprotected from cyber threats at the time. Underlying was, once more, the belief that you should do what is right. It drove the team to create the Hummingbird cipher for small, resource-constrained devices. Today Hummingbird is more needed than ever and it has matured through thousands of hours of cryptanalytic scrutiny.