Yesterday, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) granted their most prestigious award the Turing award to Whitfield DIFFIE and Martin HELLMAN. If you read regularly this blog, you know probably them. In their seminal 1976 paper, they launched the foundations of asymmetric cryptography. Previously, only symmetric cryptography was known. Two years later, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman published the RSA algorithm based on these principles. Without public key cryptography, modern security would not be possible. We still use the DH protocol.

A well-deserved prize.

• Diffie, W., and M. Hellman. “New Directions in Cryptography.” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 22, no. 6 (1976): 644–54.
  
• Rivest, R. L., A. Shamir, and L. Adleman. “A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems.” Communications of the ACM 21, no. 2 (1978): 120–26.