Quantum-secure encryption: Turing Award for founders of quantum informatics

This year's Turing Award, endowed with a million US dollars in prize money, goes to Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard for their "decisive contribution to the foundations of quantum informatics." This was announced by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which is responsible for the highest award in computer science. In 1984, the two developed the first practical protocol for quantum cryptography in a scientific paper – it is now known by the designation BB84. With it, they showed that two parties can create a secret key for encrypting information, the security of which is guaranteed by the laws of physics – even against opponents with unlimited computing power, the society recalls.

Foundation for future-proof cryptography

In a brief outline, the society refers to the work of Claude Shannon. In 1949, the mathematician had proven that perfect secrecy in communication is only possible if both parties have exchanged a secret key that is at least as long as the message encrypted with it. Asymmetric cryptography then enabled a "powerful remedy" by relying on a mathematical problem that seemed sufficiently difficult to solve for protecting messages instead. The method is an important foundation of digital infrastructure today, but it is vulnerable to quantum computers. BB84 offers a remedy, where even attempts to eavesdrop leave detectable traces.

The recognition of the achievement now comes a year after the United Nations' International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, the ACM further writes. It explains that the American Bennett and the Canadian Brassard had brought together many areas of physics and computer science in their more than forty-year collaboration. This includes quantum entanglement, where two particles exhibit correlated behavior even when they are too far apart spatially to influence each other directly. For the experimental confirmation of related phenomena, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 2022. The work of the two researchers laid the foundation for an entire generation of researchers who have followed in their footsteps.

The Turing Award is presented annually by the ACM and is also considered the "Nobel Prize for Computer Science." It is named after Alan Turing, the British mathematician and pioneer of computer science and cryptology. Since 2014, the prize has been endowed with one million US dollars. Well-known recipients include Donald Knuth (1974), Edsger W. Dijkstra (1972), and Niklaus Wirth, who passed away in early 2024 (1984). Three years ago, the Turing Award went to Robert Metcalfe, founder of the network company 3com. He had invented Ethernet – allegedly on a napkin. In 2024, Avi Wigderson was honored for his contributions to understanding the properties of random numbers and algorithms. The previous year, the Turing Award was presented to Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton for the development of so-called reinforcement learning.

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(mho)