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2016 Turing Award goes to Cryptography Pioneers: Martin E. Hellman, Stanford EE Department (Present) and Whitfield Diffie, Stanford AI Lab (70s – 80s), for “Public-Key Cryptography”

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

This year, it was announced during the RSA Conference, a security technology symposium held here this week.

Named for Alan Turing, the British mathematician and computer scientist, the award is particularly noteworthy because it comes at a time that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is locked in a bitter feud with Apple over the agency’s inability to unlock the cryptographic system that protects digital information stored in the company’s iPhones.

While private information can be protected with a so-called “symmetric” key, or a single digital code, that is used to mathematically scramble the data, the problem becomes much more difficult when two parties who have not met physically wish to have a secret interaction.

The privacy protection technology that is now used extensively to protect modern electronic communications is based on Mr. Diffie’s and Mr. Hellman’s original research that led to the creation of “public-key cryptography” technology.

Public-key cryptography is a method for scrambling data in which each party has a pair of keys, one which can be publicly shared and the other which is known only to the intended recipient of a message. It is possible for anyone to encrypt a message using the individual’s public key. However, the message can only be unscrambled with the aid of the private key held securely by the recipient of the message.

In the United States and elsewhere, cryptography was once a highly classified military and intelligence agency technology. But in the 1970s academic researchers began delving into the field, which led to clashes with law enforcement and spy agencies.

Whitfield Diffie, then a young programmer at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, read Mr. McCarthy’s paper and began to think about the question of what would take the place of an individual signature in a paperless world. Mr. Diffie would spend the next several years pursuing that challenge and in 1976, with Martin E. Hellman, an electrical engineer at Stanford, invented “public-key cryptography,” a technique that would two decades later make possible the commercial World Wide Web.

SOURCE

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/technology/cryptography-pioneers-to-win-turing-award.html?action=click&contentCollection=Technology&module=RelatedCoverage&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article

REFERENCE

THE FEDS HAVE LET THE CYBER WORLD BURN. LET’S PUT THE FIRE OUT

Dan Kaminsky, 3/1/2016

http://www.wired.com/2016/03/feds-let-cyber-world-burn-lets-put-fire/