Turing Award granted to encryption pioneers

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced its decision to grant the 2015 Turing Award (also known at the ‘Nobel Prize of Computing’) to Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman, for ‘critical contributions to modern cryptography’. In a paper published in 1976 and called ’New Directions in Cryptography’, Diffie and Hellman introduced two concepts that are are today at the basis of many Internet security protocols: asymmetric or public-key cryptography, and digital signatures.