by Whitfield Diffie

About the author: Whitfield Diffie is an engineer at Sun Microsystems in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and the inventor of encryption systems for the Internet.

Like the oceans of 200 years ago, the Internet is a far from safe place. Pirates lie in wait to penetrate computer systems, steal trade secrets and cheat people out of their wares. The only way to secure Internet commerce is by building security into the programs through encryption, the process of scrambling information so that only people who hold the secret keys can decode it.

The Government Wants to Control Encryption

Unfortunately, the strong encryption systems that should be in every spreadsheet, word processor and e-mail program are not readily available. The reason is simple. The Federal Government has refused to allow companies to export such systems...