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For a couple years I had an office across the hall from Diffie at Sun Labs and spent many a Friday evening Sun Labs Bash chatting with him about various topics of all kinds. Diffie is a kind and gracious man, well versed on a broad range of topics, a lot of fun, and well, a better dresser than I. Congrats to him and Martin Hellman!
History may have been different if you'd been comparable dressers... Interesting to read things from contemporaries of famous computer scientists
Interesting story about Diffie testifying at the Newegg trial.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/newegg-trial-cryp...
"We've heard a good bit in this courtroom about public key encryption," said Albright. "Are you familiar with that?"
"Yes, I am," said Diffie, in what surely qualified as the biggest understatement of the trial.
"And how is it that you're familiar with public key encryption?"
"I invented it."
Don't miss the followup: Newegg still lost.
I think it's clear that this is very uncoincidentally an extremely timely award. The average person may have no idea, but we are in the middle of a cryptowar[1].
[1] http://reason.com/archives/2013/03/12/the-second-great-crypt...
Yeah. Individual achievement aside (and I'm not minimizing it in any way, shape or form), I'm pretty sure this is the CS profession's way of telling the FBI to get bent.
I wonder if the timing is coincident with potentially a 2nd Clinton coming to the whitehouse?
Both gave speeches about the history of their research:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTGqP0nxX08
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BJuuUxCaaY
Merkle had a huge influence also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Merkle
Huge influence? It's his paper, his invention and this price without him is again a huge fuckup.
But he should be used to that in the meantime.
Any advice on what paper of theirs to read in celebration of the event? Something approachable.
When Lamport got his in 2013 I took the time to read "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" [1]. Been sleeping under the rock since then.
Diffie and Hellman's 1976 paper, "New Directions in Cryptography"[1], cited by their Turing Award, seems like a good start.
[1] https://www-ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/publications/24.pdf
Also relevant: Whitfield Diffie's 1988 paper, "The First Ten Years of Public-Key Cryptography"[1].
I attended the panel today when this was announced, and regarding the omission of Ralph Merkle, both recipients explicitly acknowledged him by name. Diffie specifically said that they built upon his prior work.
It also occurred to me that Moxie Marlinspike was in the unusual position of being the only one on the panel of five not to have (yet!) received a Turing Award. (He came off very well nonetheless.)
(In addition to Diffie and Hellman, the other two Turing-awarded panelists were Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir.)
I'm a big fan of Moxie's work, but would you mind elaborating on for which work he'd receive a Turing award? I'm not familiar with their eligibility standards. Thanks!
I used to wrongly think you need a PhD to be able to win a Turing. Diffe proved me wrong. He serves as an inspiration to anyone who mentally feels inferior to PhDs when it comes to making significant contributions to the field of Computer Science
I originally wanted to do a PhD because of the feeling smart aspect; but actuall, after I had started it (actually during the middle) I had a realisation that the people doing PhDs weren't necessarily smart; but rather they were either highly passionate about what they were doing or really enjoyed doing research.
As it happens I have probably created more outside of doing my PhD than in it; and whenever I was advising people on whether to do a PhD or not, would strongly suggest that they didn't. (The ones that ignored that advice and pressed on were exactly the type of people who could keep up the slog of doing it.)
Lots of people don't make it to the end and the going gets really tough towards the end, particularly when you are writing up and especially problematic if you have a young family. There's only so much time you can burn the candle at both ends.
So don't worry about not having a PhD; in fact, I'd argue that some of my undergraduate friends went on to much bigger and better things than I primarily because they got into the industry much earlier and therefore worked their way up.
Plus creating a startup now is so much easier than it used to be - if you see a business need that's not being satisfied, go for it. Most startups success is entirely down to chance and not educational background in any case.
You absolutely shouldn't feel "mentally inferior" to folks with PhDs. Doing academic research, which probably involves getting a PhD, is almost certainly the best way to make a significant contribution to Computer Science. These two facts aren't really in conflict, I don't think.
The very first Turing award went to Robert Floyd... he also didn't have a PhD.
Most people with PhDs are probably pretty smart. But most smart people don't have PhDs.
Martin Hellman actually has a PhD, and their work together resulted in a Turing Award.
Martin Hellman explains what he plans to do with his share of the Turing Award money:
https://nuclearrisk.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/the-turing-awar...
A noble cause. Reminding the world we have tens of thousands of nukes ready to hit every major city at any time. I wish people were more conscious of that.
Poor Ralph Merkle. Diffie and Hellman always seem to have gone out of their way to acknowledge his contribution to public key encryption, but it looks like the ACM overlooked it.
ACM did at least acknowledge Merkle in 1996, along with Adleman, Diffie, Hellman, Rivest, and Shamir, in the inaugural Paris Kanellakis Award[1].
Merkle has an article on his website about the history of his public-key cryptography work[2].
I just found these free-to-watch episodes on crypto, featuring interviews with Diffie and Hellman: http://simonsingh.net/media/online-videos/cryptography/the-s...
This is by Simon Singh, who wrote the excellent book "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography", including a chapter on Diffie–Hellman–Merkle key exchange.
The very short interview with Clifford Cocks is good too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwNv0b-2AcU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-xEiOvXux4
"...I'm allowed to think about things outside work, but not allowed to put anything down on paper"
It speaks to how exclusive an award this is that these guys hadn't won it already. It's hard to think of achievements in computing that are as important or influential as public-key cryptography.
The ACM announcement: http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/diffie_8371646.cfm
Marty and Whit deserve kudos for their important work in cryptography.
Seems like a good place to link this awesome panel from Defcon 19 with Whitfield Diffie and Moxie Marlinspike on SSL/PKI/etc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt7uW6vDk00
Some of the Q&A is pretty weird
Since the article doesn't quote Martin Hellman here's sons of his words on cryptography (from an interview after receiving a different award): http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/march/inventor-prize-hell...
Is it usual practice for a Turing Award to be awarded so long after the work in question?
Yes. See past recipients at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award . Almost all of them are for fundamental work that everyone builds on, and seeing that relies on the benefit of years or decades of hindsight.
I think that's probable a good way to do it. Some things that gain great traction at one time may later turn out to have been just a sparkle, or a fad. Standing the test of time is a good litmus test for the importance of scientific achievements.
This was on the BBC last night:
Surprising it took this long. (Especially since, for example, RS and A have had Turing awards for more than a decade)
tl;dr version of the 2016 ACM Turing Award:
((g^a) mod p)^b mod p = (g^ab) mod p = ((g^b) mod p)^a mod p
-- The beauty of math.
Why was Merkle not included?
yayy!! This is just great! Congrats to Martin and Hellman.
Why it takes such long time for Computer Scientist to achieve such Award. DH Algo has been well known for long time. On the other hand Physicists(Theoretical, Astro, ...) dont have to wait too long to gain such recognition.
just curious, is anyone wondering why ralph-merkle is not here as well ?
Finally, took long enough.