Crypto dream team Diffie and Hellman wins $1M A.M. Turing Award

Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, whose names have been linked since their seminal paper introduced the concepts of public key encryption and digital signatures some 40 years ago, have been named winners of the 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award (a.k.a., the "Nobel Prize of Computing").

The work of MIT grad Diffie, formerly chief security officer of Sun Microsystems, and Hellman, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University, has had a huge impact on the secure exchange of information across the Internet, the cloud and email.

The annual Association for Computing Machinery prize carries a $1 million prize, with financial support from Google. Past winners have included Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf, database visionary Michael Stonebraker and recently deceased A.I. innovator Marvin Minsky.

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