Martin Hellman didn't really "get" Google.
"Much as I try to maintain an open mind to new, seemingly foolish ideas, I have to admit that I made the same mistake with respect to Google," explained the 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award co-winner.
"Since Google's search engine had been developed by two Stanford graduate students, I and my colleagues were among the first to use it. But early on, I told one of them, 'It's a great search engine, but how are they ever going to make money from free search?'" Hellman said. "I wish I'd asked that as a question—which, on the surface, it was—rather than as a statement about how impossible their business model appeared to me."
The point is, as Hellman details in the upcoming book he's co-writing with his wife Dorothie, "Many great advances were initially derided as fools' errands, before they paid off."
Hellman's early work in cryptography paved the way for all of the secure interactions we have on the Internet. That's not to say it was always well-received, though. "All of my colleagues told me I was wasting my time," Hellman reflected.
And perhaps that's why Hellman hopes his legacy is remembered by future generations as "someone who wasn't afraid to aspire to goals that appeared foolish to most."
The Turing Award is often called the "Nobel Prize of Computing." The Association of Computing Machinery named Hellman and Whitfield Diffie the 2015 Turing Award winners on March 1, 2016. Diffie and Hellman wrote a groundbreaking paper in 1976 that introduced the ideas of public-key cryptography and digital signatures, which are the foundation for most security protocols on the Internet today.
ACM President Alexander L. Wolf applauded Diffie and Hellman's contributions when announcing the award. "In 1976, Diffie and Hellman imagined a future where people would regularly communicate through electronic networks and be vulnerable to having their communications stolen or altered. Now, after nearly 40 years, we see that their forecasts were remarkably prescient," Wolf said.
Along with the honor and prestige of the award, Diffie and Hellman split a $1 million prize.
"I'll be using my share of the monetary prize as well as the publicity it brings to further work with my wife Dorothie on building a more peaceful, sustainable world," Hellman told SecureWorld Media.
Hellman's focus is no longer solely on cybersecurity, but global security. He's on the board of directors at Daisy Alliance, a non-partisan peace organization seeking global security through nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. He's also established Defusing the Nuclear Threat, through which he studies the probabilities and risks associated with nuclear weapons and encourages further international research.
Hellman believes there is a strong connection between his efforts to build a peaceful world and his work in cryptography.
"First of all, what's the point in developing clever systems such as public-key cryptography if there's a significant chance that no one will be able to use them 100 years from now? Sir Martin Rees' book, Our Final Hour, argues that humanity has about a 50-50 chance of surviving the next century, and my own work applying risk analysis to a potential failure of nuclear deterrence comes down in that same ballpark," Hellman stressed.
He adds, however, that he is more pulled by the vision of building a better world than he is pushed by the nuclear threat.
"Second, public-key cryptography was a radically new way of communicating what at first seemed impossible. How could two people talking across a crowded room, with no prearrangement, exchange information privately from all the others listening in? Yet that's what we showed how to do," Hellman explained. "Once people opened up to that radical, new possibility, previously unimaginable options were opened, including modern electronic commerce, secure software updates and more. The same is true of the interpersonal communications approach that Dorothie and I will describe in the book we are writing."
Hellman credits his wife for getting him interested and active in global issues.
"Dorothie and I initially came to work on global issues out of a desire to save our marriage, not to save the world. But we came to see a strong interplay between the two goals, and found that working on global issues, such as the nuclear threat, accelerated the work on improving our marriage," Hellman admitted.
Through his work on interpersonal communications, Hellman learned to "get curious, not furious." And he sees that as the key to global security. His blog at nuclearrisk.org concludes: "If we, as a nation, had 'gotten curious instead of furious' in 2003, we could have avoided the current disaster in Iraq. The same was true in 1964 in Vietnam, and at many other times and places. And, each of those needless wars created needless nuclear risk since every war has some small chance of escalating out of control."
When recently describing their book concept and global issues work to a guest at a party, they were met with a polite, but dismissive response. As Dorothie describes in their book, the woman "made it clear she thought we were on a fool's errand. To which Marty replied, 'Thank you! That's the best compliment you could pay me.'"
So, if there's anything to be learned from Martin Hellman's long and distinguished career, it must be that there is wisdom in foolishness—especially when it comes to breakthroughs.