A US physicist and a Canadian computer scientist have won this year's Turing Award for their invention of a form of seemingly unbreakable encryption.
Charles H Bennett and Gilles Brassard's work, which dates back to 1984, is known as quantum cryptography and has redefined secure communication and computing, the award's body said.
Scientists believe their work will be central to electronic communications in a world that depends heavily on data-sharing, but which for years has been trying to develop more powerful quantum computers.
The Turing Award, named after mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing, is known as the Nobel Prize of computing. It comes with a $1 million (£800,000) prize.
Bennett, 82, is a fellow at technology company IBM in New York, while Brassard, 70, is a professor at the University of Montreal. The pair met by chance whilst attending an academic conference in Puerto Rico in 1979.
Bennett is reported to have approached Brassard while they were swimming during a break to suggest developing a banknote that could never be forged.
This idea sparked decades of collaboration, culminating in a technique based on quantum physics - the behavior of particles of matter, including electrons and photons.
Current encryption technology relies on complex mathematical combinations, which many scientists believe will become insecure with the advent of quantum computers.
In contrast, Bennett and Brassard's theory, known as BB84, demonstrates that any attempt to hack or copy their quantum encryption key changes the very behavior of its elements, making replication impossible.
In the announcement on Wednesday, the Association of Computer Machinery praised their work as a pathway toward securing digital communications in the decades ahead.
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