Skip to Content

Two Cryptographers Win Turing Prize in the Midst of Apple’s Fight with FBI

The announcement of the “Nobel Prize of computing” comes as the federal government is embroiled in a massive fight over the limits of encryption.
March 2, 2016

It may be no coincidence that the two winners of this year’s Turing Award did much to shape one of the most controversial questions of our time: whether the government has the right to unlock our digital secrets. The $1 million award announced on Tuesday is awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery, and often dubbed the Nobel Prize of computing.

Most likely, Apple wouldn’t be battling the FBI over iPhone security had Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie not figured out a way for two parties to communicate securely over insecure digital networks using pairs of so-called public and private cryptographic keys. And Diffie, in particular, has long been an outspoken advocate of an individual’s right to privacy in the face of government surveillance demands. So the timing is nothing if not auspicious in light of the Apple-FBI spat.

Hellman and Diffie discovered an ingenious mathematical algorithm that makes it possible to encrypt a message using a person’s public key together with your own private key so that it can be unlocked using that person’s private key and your public one. But any eavesdropper cannot practically unlock the message using the public keys alone.

A British cryptographer, James Ellis, may have separately invented public-key cryptography several years before Hellman and Diffie. However, since Ellis worked for the British code-breaking agency GCHQ at the time, his efforts—somewhat ironically—remained secret for many years.

(Read more: "DoJ to Apple: Unlocking the iPhone Won't Set a Legal Precedent," "In Apple vs. the FBI, There Is No Technical Middle Ground," "Apple's 'Code = Speech' Mistake")

Keep Reading

Most Popular

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.