Pioneers of cryptography Diffie and Hellman awarded the Turing Award

In the early 1970s, an idea emerged among scientists that so-called “home information terminals” would be distributed in the future. They will be connected via a telephone network to a public computer that stores all books, magazines, newspapers, flight schedules, personal files, and so on. A report on this topic in 1970 at a conference in Bordeaux was read by Stanford researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, writes the NY Times.

Whitfield Diffie, a young programmer from the laboratory of artificial intelligence at Stanford University, read the McCarthy report and thought that he would take the place of the usual signature of a person in this new digital world. The solution of the problem took several years, and in 1976, together with the professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, Martin Hellman, they presented the realization of their idea - the so-called “public key encryption” or asymmetric cryptosystem.

Two decades later, this technique will make possible the emergence of the web in its current form (HTTPS, SSH), e-commerce, as well as publicly available cryptographic tools (PGP).
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March 1, 2016 the invention of Diffie and Hellman was rewarded according to merit. The Computer Engineering Association (ACM) has announced that they have been awarded the Turing Prize, the most prestigious computer science award, which is compared to the Nobel Prize. Since 2014, when Google quadrupled the amount of remuneration, it is a million dollars.

A cryptographic system with a public key provides for the transfer of the public key over an unsecured channel to verify the electronic signature and encrypt the message. To generate a signature and decrypt the message using the private key.

This year's announcement of the winners took place during the RSA conference on information security.



The award was established by the Computer Engineering Association in honor of the outstanding English scientist Alan Turing, who received the first profound results regarding computability long before the appearance of the first electronic computers.

The Turing Prize is awarded annually to one or more specialists in the field of computer science and computing, whose contribution in this field has had a strong and lasting impact on the computer community.

The recognition of the achievements of Diffie and Hellman right now is especially noteworthy in light of the attack on public cryptography by the FBI . Due to the persistent asymmetric cryptosystem from Diffie and Hellman, special services are not able to access information on our mobile phones.