Contact: Tina Angelone 212-626-0532 angelone@acm.org IMMEDIATE THE FIRST ACM PARIS KANELLAKIS THEORY AND PRACTICE AWARD GOES TO FOUNDERS OF PUBLIC-KEY CRYPTOGRAPHY New York, NY February 12, 1997…The Association for Computing's (ACM) Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, named in memory of Paris Kanellakis whose tragic death in December 1995 cut short a distinguished research career, will be presented for the first time to the six founders of public-key cryptography. The Award will be given to Leonard Adleman, University of Southern California; Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems; Martin Hellman, Stanford University; Ralph Merkle, Xerox PARC; Ronald Rivest, MIT; and Adi Shamir, The Weizmann Institute of Science, on Mar. 2,1997 during the ACM awards banquet which will be held in conjunction with "ACM97: The Next 50 Years of Computing," a worldwide interactive event on the long-term impact of the future. This Award is given to the six founders "for the conception and first effective realization of public-key cryptography. The idea of a public-key cryptosystem was a major conceptual breakthrough that continues to stimulate research to this day, and without it today's rapid growth of electronic commerce would have been impossible." The idea of public-key cryptosystem was conceived in 1976 by Diffie, Hellman and Merkle, while Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman provided its first effective realization in 1977. Public-key cryptography is wide-spread and rapidly growing. "The increased use of shared communications channels, particularly wireless and local area networks (LAN's), leads to greater connectivity, but also to a much greater opportunity to intercept data and forge messages," said Peter Wegner, chair of ACM's Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award committee and computer science professor at Brown University. "The only practical way to maintain privacy and integrity of information is by using public-key cryptography." -more- The Award includes a monetary prize of $5000. The Award is endowed by contributions from the Kanellakis family, and financial support has been provided by PWS Publishing Company and International Thomson Computer Press, ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computational Theory (SIGACT), ACM's Special Interest Group on Management Data (SIGMOD), the ACM Special Interest Group Discretionary Fund, and individual contributions. ACM is a major force in advancing the skills of information technology professionals and students. ACM serves its global membership by delivering cutting-edge technical information and transferring ideas from theory to practice. ACM, with its world-class journals, magazines and books, dynamic special interest groups, numerous conferences, workshops, and electronic forums, is a primary resource to the IT field. For additional information about ACM visit our web site at http://www.acm.org. ###