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Journalism of Courage
Whitfield Diffie and Martin E Hellman have been awarded the Turing Award for 2015, named after British mathematician Alan M Turing, who is regarded as the father of computer science.
Both Diffie and Hellman have been awarded for their contributions to modern cryptography, according to an official statement by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which gives out the annual $1 million prize.
Whitfield Diffie is former Chief Security Officer of Sun Microsystems, while Martin E Hellman is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. The duo have been awarded for their efforts to ensure secure digital communications between two parties.
“Today, the subject of encryption dominates the media, is viewed as a matter of national security, impacts government-private sector relations, and attracts billions of dollars in research and development. In 1976, Diffie and Hellman imagined a future where people would regularly communicate through electronic networks and be vulnerable to having their communications stolen or altered. Now, after nearly 40 years, we see that their forecasts were remarkably prescient,” said ACM President Alexander . Wolf in a statement.
Diffie and Hellman’s 1976 paper titled, “New Directions in Cryptography,” introduced the ideas of public-key cryptography and digital signatures, which are the foundation for most regularly-used security protocols on the Internet today. Their paper laid the groundwork for protecting online financial transactions.
They developed what is known as the ‘asymmetric cryptosystem’ where that encryption was possible, even with a public key that can be freely distributed, while a private key is used for decryption. One cannot calculate the private key based on the public key, even via a computer, in this system.
AMC notes that Diffie and Hellman’s work made encryption technologies accessible to individuals and companies.
