ACM Turing Award 2012

Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali Receive 2012 ACM Turing Award For Advances In Cryptography

Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali laid the foundations of modern theoretical cryptography, taking it from a field of heuristics and hopes to a mathematical science with careful definitions and security models, precise specifications of adversarial capabilities, and rigorous reductions from formally defined computational problems. Their results, jointly and with others, established the now-standard definitions of security for the fundamental primitives of encryption and digital signatures, and provided exemplary implementations meeting the stated security objectives. Even more importantly, their work helped to establish the tone and character of modern cryptographic research. Jointly and in collaboration with others, they provided stunning innovations in the form of random functions, interactive proofs, and zero-knowledge protocols, with implications beyond cryptography to theoretical computer science in general.