Quantum pioneers who perfected secrecy receive Turing Award | CNN

Years before emails, internet banking, cloud servers and cryptocurrency wallets, two scientists devised a way to keep secrets perfectly safe and indecipherable to eavesdropping outsiders. Their 1984 work depended on the hidden, counterintuitive world of quantum physics, which governs the way the world works at the smallest, subatomic scale, rather than complex but theoretically breakable mathematical codes to secure data. The insights of Charles Bennett, an American physicist who is a fellow at IBM Research, and Gilles Brassard, a Canadian computer scientist and professor at the University of Montreal, have since transformed cryptography and computing. The pair received the A.M. Turing Award on Wednesday for their groundbreaking work on quantum key cryptography. Named after the late mathematician and wartime codebreaker Alan Mathison Turin, who articulated the mathematical foundations of computing, the honor is widely considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. “Cryptography is a fundamental pillar of the global economy and our safety and our security and our sovereignty. It’s really the invisible background plumbing,” said Michele Mosca, cofounder and CEO of cybersecurit