$1M Turing Award winners advocate for encryption

Whitfield Diffie, a former chief security officer of Sun Microsystems, and Martin Hellman, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University, introduced the ideas of public-key cryptography and digital signatures back in 1976.

The concepts now secure all kinds of data, from online communications and financial transactions to Internet-connected infrastructure like power plants.

The honor was announced Tuesday, the same day that FBI Director James Comey and Apple's top lawyer appealed to Congress for help as the government seeks to force the technology company to hack into a terrorist's iPhone.

[...] everyone today is jockeying for their position with those machines, and this is just one aspect of that.

Hellman told the AP that he sympathizes with efforts to investigate the attack, at least partly inspired by the Islamic State group, in which a couple killed 14 people before dying in a gun battle with police.