Whitfield Diffie And Martin Hellman Won Acm 2015 A M Turing Award

The deserving two, Stanford’s cryptographers who brought up cryptography from a shadowy realm to the public space have been conferred upon the A M Turing Award 2015 of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). The Award is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize for Computing” that comes with a whooping $1 million prize funded by Google.

CRYPTOGRAPHY:

• It is a method of storing and transmitting data in a particular form so that it can be read its intended receivers only.
• The aforesaid Awardees are into Public-Key Cryptography which is a method of scrambling data in which each party has a pair of keys, one which can be shared publicly and the other with the intended recipient.

The Awardees presented the paper “ New Directions in Cryptography” in 1976 which proposed the possibility of allowing people to communicate over an open channel, with no pre-arrangement but keeping their information secret from potential eavesdroppers.

• They came up with the idea of digital signatures which have become a critical aspect of the modern security architecture.
• It was a major breakthrough that enabled modern e-commerce and secured connection over the internet.
• This paper is widely viewed as the birth of modern Cryptography.