Diffie, Hellman Win Turing Award for Public Key Encryption

Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman have received the 2016 Turing Award for the discovery of public key encryption, the cornerstone of network security. The award is named for Alan Turing, a computer scientist who helped pioneer modern computing and broke the German Enigma code, hastening the end of the Second World war. The Turing award is considered the Nobel Prize of computer science and is given for major contributions of lasting importance by the Association of Computing Machinery. Diffie, a member of the EPIC Advisory Board, was one of the founders of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and received the EPIC Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012.

March 1, 2016| Share: