Communications of the ACM
Cybersecurity, Nuclear Security, Alan Turing, and Illogical Logic
Credit: Andrij Borys Associates
The 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award recognized work I did 40 years ago, so it is understandable that my interests have changed significantly, with my most recent project being a book, A New Map for Relationships: Creating True Love at Home & Peace on the Planet, co-authored with my wife Dorothie. While, at first glance, the book might seem to have nothing in common with my work on cryptography, my Turing Lecture drew a number of parallels I will bring out in what follows.
Key Insights
The story starts in March 1975, when the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (NBS), now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), proposed a Data Encryption Standard (DES) to protect unclassified but sensitive data. Whitfield Diffie, with whom I shared the Award, and I quickly realized that DES's 56-bit key size was inadequate and needed to be increased.
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