Turing Award Goes to Inventors of Quantum Cryptography

Supported by Turing Award Goes to Inventors of Quantum Cryptography In the 1980s, Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard created a new kind of encryption that would be impregnable. In the mid-1980s, Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard invented an encryption technology that could theoretically never be broken. Called quantum cryptography, their technology relied on quantum mechanics, the strange and powerful behavior exhibited by electrons, photons and other very small things. At the time, their technique was a fascinating but impractical creation. Forty years later, it is poised to become an essential way of protecting the world’s most sensitive information. On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, said Drs. Bennett and Brassard had won this year’s Turing Award for their work on quantum cryptography and related technologies. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the two scientists will share. In recent years, companies like Google and Microsoft have made great strides toward building a new kind of computer, called a quantum computer, which also relies on the counterintuitive properties of quantum mechanics. Experts believe that such a machine will soon be powerful enough to crack the encryption techniques that have guarded the world’s secrets since the 1970s. If that happens, governments, businesses and even individuals will need the cryptographic techniques developed by Dr. Bennett, 82, a researcher at an IBM computer science lab in Yorktown, N.Y., and Dr. Brassard, 70, a professor at the University of Montreal. Related Content Advertisement