ACM Names Bennett & Brassard 2025 Turing Award Laureates for Inventing Quantum Cryptography

Quantum cryptography’s elevation to Turing-level status echoes the 1978 recognition of Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman’s public-key scheme, which similarly moved from niche theory to global infrastructure once the internet exploded in the 1990s. Today’s prize signals a pivot in the long arc of secure communication: from hardness-of-math assumptions to physics-guaranteed secrecy. It fits a 100-year pattern in which breakthroughs (e.g., the 1940 Enigma-cracking at Bletchley Park or the 1994 Shor algorithm) force entire security paradigms to flip. By canonizing BB84 just as governments pour billions—£2 billion in the U.K., € billions in the EU—into post-quantum readiness, ACM is effectively validating quantum information science as a foundational layer of 21st-century infrastructure. Whether, a century from now, BB84 proves as ubiquitous as TCP/IP or merely a transitional technology will depend on whether scalable, fault-tolerant quantum computers—projected by IBM for 2029—arrive before alternative, cheaper post-quantum cryptosystems dominate. Either way, the award crystallizes a historic shift: information security is leaving pure mathematics and entering the domain of the physical laws themselves.