0 Shares 0



0

0







The annual $1 million A.M. Turing Award went to two cryptographers who were instrumental in the development of the internet. Whitfield Diffie is a former chief security officer at Sun Microsystems and Martin Hellman is a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University, both of whom have warned repeatedly against allowing governments control over encrypted communications.

The two men introduced the concept of both public-key cryptography and digital signatures in 1976, well before such technology was a standard of digital communication; in fact before digital communication was standard.

Today public-key cryptography protects everything from online communications and financial transactions to Internet-reliant infrastructure like power plants and hospitals.

It is such an ubiquitous part of digital security that the majority of technology users do not ever need to think about in their daily life.

That is, until the FBI starts demanding digital encryption keys from companies like Apple, the predominant maker of handheld technology.

Diffie and Hellman were granted the award on the same day that both FBI Director James Comey and Apple attorneys presented their respective cases to the House Judiciary Committee.

The hearing comes after the FBI demanded Apple provide decryption codes for the Apple iPhone belonging to Syed Rizwan Farook, the main perpetrator of the San Bernardino massacre in December that left 14 people dead.

The two awardees became versed in technology security and privacy while researchers at Stanford University in the 1970s.

Public-key cryptography works by using a large and random series of numbers and letters as the private key known only to the owner, to unlock a unique message in the public-key, which can only be unlocked by the specific private-key of the end user.

The development of public-key technology altered the paradigm in digital security, as it took the power of encryption out of government hands and put it in those of everyday users.

“What we did was reduce the need to know people before talking to them,” Diffie told The Associated Press.

The National Security Agency, now famous for whistleblower Edward Snowden’s release of documents that prove the agency spies on and stores nearly every digital communication with fast and loose regulation, hassled the two inventors profusely when they first researched and developed the technology. The spy agency wanted to keep the technology out of the hands of the public, as they knew it would hinder attempts to spy on the public.

The ensuing battle was dubbed the first “crypto-war.”

Diffie considers the current FBI-Apple fight part of a large scale initiative by the government to control and have access to consumer information and communication.

“I think the people who will control the machines will control the world of the future,” Diffie said. “Therefore, everyone today is jockeying for their position with those machines, and this is just one aspect of that.”

Speaking to Associated Press, Hellman sees the issue as part of the “slippery-slope” argument.

“The problem isn’t so much with this first request, it’s the precedent that it would set and the avalanche of requests that would follow,” Hellman says. He maintained partly the same defense as Apple, saying that once the lock is picked so to speak, it is impossible to say who else will have a-la-carte access to private digital communications. Hellman invoked China, Russia and Saudi Arabia as threats, although the United States government is a considerably repressive regime when it comes to spying on and suppressing its people.

In its fight against the FBI, Apple has the tacit support of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and now Hellman, who says he will sign onto one of the “Friend of the Court” briefs in the case.

The A.M. Turing award is named after British mathematician Alan Turing and comes from the Association for Computing Machinery, funded mainly by Google. It is one of the most prestigious computing awards.