The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced the winners of the 2015 Turing Award, which is sometimes referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing.” The prize will go to Whitfield Diffie, former chief security officer at Sun Microsystems, and Martin E. Hellman, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University.
In 1976, the two men published a paper titled “New Directions in Cryptography,” which pioneered the ideas of public-key cryptography and digital signatures. Today, their ideas underpin security on the Internet.
Diffie and Hellman will share the $1 million prize that accompanies the award.
