Pioneering work 40 years ago lead to PGP, TLS, and all your fav crypto protocols. On Tuesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the nation’s leading organization for computer science, awarded its annual top prize of $1 million to two men whose name will forever be immortalized in cryptography: Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman.
The 2015 ACM Turing Award, which is sometimes referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” was awarded to a former chief security officer at Sun Microsystems and a professor at Stanford University, respectively.
In their landmark 1976 paper, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange was the first to explore ideas of “public-key cryptography.”
Read more at Ars Technica
