The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers, Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali, are recipients of the 2012 A.M. Turing Award. Their innovations became the gold standard for enabling secure internet transactions. The Turing award is widely considered the “Nobel Prize in Computing,” and carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc.

According to the ACM press release, “Working together, they pioneered the field of provable security, which laid the mathematical foundations that made modern cryptography possible. By formalizing the concept that cryptographic security had to be computational rather than absolute, they created mathematical structures that turned cryptography from an art into a science. Their work addresses important practical problems such as the protection of data from being viewed or modified, providing a secure means of communications and transactions over the Internet. Their advances led to the notion of interactive and probabilistic proofs and had a profound impact on computational complexity, an area that focuses on classifying computational problems according to their inherent difficulty.”

ACM President Vint Cerf said,“The encryption schemes running in today’s browsers meet their notions of security.  The method of encrypting credit card numbers when shopping on the Internet also meets their test.  We are indebted to these recipients for their innovative approaches to ensuring security in the digital age.”

ACM will present the 2012 A.M. Turing Award at its annual Awards Banquet on June 15 in San Francisco, CA.

Read ACM’s Press Release on the 2012 Turing Award recipients