THE ACM A. M. TURING AWARD

“The work of Goldwasser and Micali has expanded the cryptography field beyond confidentiality concerns,” said Limor Fix, Director of the University Collaborative Research Group, Intel Labs. “Their innovations also led to techniques for message integrity checking and sender/ receiver identity authentication as well as digital signatures used for software distribution, financial transactions, and other cases where it is important to detect forgery or tampering. They have added immeasurably to our ability to conduct communication and commerce over the Internet.”

For more information see www.intel.com/research.

ACM, Intel, and Google congratulate SHAFI GOLDWASSER and SILVIO MICALI for transformative work that laid the complexity-theoretic foundations for the science of cryptography, and in the process pioneered new methods for efficient verification of mathematical proofs in complexity theory.

“Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives at Google Inc., said Goldwasser and Micali developed cryptographic algorithms that are designed around computational hardness assumptions, making such algorithms hard to break in practice. “In the computer era, these advances in cryptography have transcended the cryptography of Alan Turing’s code-breaking era. They now have applications for ATM cards, computer passwords and electronic commerce as well as preserving the secrecy of participant data such as electronic voting. These are monumental achievements that have changed how we live and work.”

For more information, see http://www.google.com/corporate/ index.html and http://research.google.com/.