This year’s ACM Turing Award has been bestowed to two cryptography researchers from MIT – Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali. The duo has awarded this recognition for pioneering modern cryptography and devising mechanisms to secure internet communications.
Goldwasser and Micali started collaborating as graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley. “While toying around with the idea of how to securely play a game of poker over the phone, they devised a scheme for encrypting and ensuring the security of single bits of data. From there, Goldwasser and Micali proved that their scheme could be scaled up to tackle much more complex problems, such as communications protocols and Internet transactions.”
This laid the foundations how modern day communications are encrypted to ensure security. Recognizing their contribution in “revolutionizing the science of cryptography” the ACM panel has selected Goldwasser and Micali for the Turing Award, ften described as the “Nobel Prize in computing.” They will receive a prize money of $250,000 funded by Google and Microsoft.
Source: MIT
[ttjad keyword=”security”]
