Whitfield Diffie—the veteran CSO (Chief Security Officer) of Sun Microsystems and crypto pioneer extraordinaire—has finally left Sun on the eighteenth of November even as database-titan Oracle's purchase of the software company is still left hanging in the air. An article from the Technology Review states that Diffie is scheduled to visit Royal Holloway, University of London, as a lecturer of sorts after eighteen straight years of working at Sun in a high-profile security role as a CSO executive.

It's presently unclear why the long-time Sun vanguard left and whether his sudden exit was in any way connected to recent company layoffs or Oracle's upcoming takeover. As always, Oracle declined to comment on the matter. At any rate, Diffie himself was renowned for his groundbreaking innovation that he invented way back in 1975—the public key cryptography or PKI.

At present, the PKI is taken for granted because it's so ubiquitous. It's currently (and widely) utilized by many corporations and individuals to safeguard web-based businesses, documents, and correspondences (emails) in daily online communications and commercial deals. People should also remember that Diffie was the person who helped make modern-day communication privacy a reality. He even sparred with U.S. politicians and spooks from the FBI in order to make his invention flourish and avoid having the government restrain the number of people who could use the PKI.

Diffie became part of the Sun Microsystems family back in 1991 and, eleven years later in 2002, became the CSO of the company. He certainly approved of Sun's mission-vision that intended to lead a worldwide initiative to spread Sun's security offerings in an almost evangelical manner. He was also responsible for discussing significant matters that are connected to IT security in general.

During one of his speech engagements, Diffie's old spunk from his days of fighting government officials came about as he passionately protected the open source paradigm from an assault by then-Microsoft CSO Craig Mundie at the 2002 RSA Conference. Mundie claimed that open source's superior security ability when compared to closed propriety software is a "myth" of sorts. Diffie immediately lashed back, arguing that even though open source wasn't necessarily more secure than paid software, it at least lets users inspect the code.