“Bennett and Brassard fundamentally changed our understanding of information itself,” said Yannis Ioannidis, president of the Association for Computing Machinery, as the group named Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard winners of the 2025 ACM A.M. Turing Award.
The prize is often called the “Nobel Prize in Computing” and carries $1 million, funded by Google. Bennett is a physicist at IBM Research. Brassard is a computer scientist at the Université de Montréal, where he has been a full professor since 1988 and Canada Research Chair since 2001. The citation covers their work in quantum information science, from pioneering quantum cryptography to discovering quantum teleportation.
The award is named for Alan Mathison Turing (1912 to 1954), the British mathematician and codebreaker.
The 1984 paper
In 1984 the pair published “Quantum Cryptography: Public Key Distribution and Coin Tossing,” the BB84 protocol. It gave the first practical way to set up a secret key whose security is guaranteed by the laws of physics, not by assumptions about what an adversary can compute.
That matters because classical public-key cryptography, the backbone of digital security today, may be vulnerable to future quantum computers. BB84 and related protocols offer what is called information-theoretic security. BB84 has already been put into operation in networks around the world, satellite links among them.
Their work also brought in entanglement-based protocols and quantum teleportation. Teleportation sends quantum states between distant devices using entanglement and classical communication. Entanglement distillation turns imperfect connections into high-quality quantum links. Both ideas are central to building secure quantum networks.
Reaction and reach
Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, said their “visionary insights laid the groundwork for one of the most exciting frontiers in science and technology.” He added that the work “continues to influence both fundamental research and real-world innovation.”
IoT Insider, which reported the award, stressed the Internet of Things. Networks of millions of connected devices carry sensitive data, and secure key exchange, device authentication and sensor-network management all depend on sound key distribution. The outlet pointed to smart cities, industrial automation and critical national infrastructure as places quantum networks could help.
Over the decades, the collaboration has linked physics and computer science and shaped cryptography, algorithm design, computational complexity and learning theory. Bennett has won the Wolf Prize, the Micius Quantum Prize and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. Brassard is an Officer of the Order of Canada and of the Ordre national du Québec.
Sources
- Quantum pioneers Bennett and Brassard win 2025 Turing Award: securing the IoT future
- Gilles Brassard
