Cynthia Dwork | |
---|---|
Born | June 27, 1958 |
Alma mater | Princeton University (BSE) Cornell University (PhD) |
Known for | Differential privacy Non-Malleable Cryptography Proof-of-work |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Computer science [1] |
Institutions | Harvard University |
Thesis | Bounds on Fundamental Problems in Parallel and Distributed Computation (1984) |
Doctoral advisor | John Hopcroft [2] [3] |
Website | dwork |
Cynthia Dwork (born June 27, 1958[ citation needed ]) is an American computer scientist renowned for her contributions to cryptography, distributed computing, and algorithmic fairness. She is one of the inventors of differential privacy and proof-of-work.
Dwork works at Harvard University, where she is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science, Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Affiliated Professor at Harvard Law School and Harvard's Department of Statistics.
Dwork was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2008 for fundamental contributions to distributed algorithms and the security of cryptosystems.
Dwork received her B.S.E. from Princeton University in 1979, graduating Cum Laude, and receiving the Charles Ira Young Award for Excellence in Independent Research. Dwork received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1983 [3] for research supervised by John Hopcroft. [4] [2]
Dwork is known for her research placing privacy-preserving data analysis on a mathematically rigorous foundation, including the invention of differential privacy in the early to mid 2000s, a strong privacy guarantee frequently permitting highly accurate data analysis. [5] The definition of differential privacy relies on the notion of indistinguishability of the outputs irrespective of whether an individual has contributed their data or not. This is typically achieved by adding small amounts of noise either to the input data or to outputs of computations performed on the data. [6] She uses a systems-based approach to studying fairness in algorithms including those used for placing ads. [7] Dwork has also made contributions in cryptography and distributed computing, and is a recipient of the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize for her early work on the foundations of fault-tolerant systems. [8]
Her contributions in cryptography include non-malleable cryptography with Danny Dolev and Moni Naor in 1991, the first lattice-based cryptosystem with Miklós Ajtai in 1997, which was also the first public-key cryptosystem for which breaking a random instance is as hard as solving the hardest instance of the underlying mathematical problem ("worst-case/average-case equivalence"). With Naor she also first presented the idea of, and a technique for, combating e-mail spam by requiring a proof of computational effort, also known as proof-of-work — a key technology underlying hashcash and bitcoin.
Her publications [1] include:
She was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in 2008, [9] [10] as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2008, as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, as a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 2015, [11] and as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2016. [12]
Dwork received a number of awards for her work.
Dwork is the daughter of American mathematician Bernard Dwork, and sister of historian Debórah Dwork.[ citation needed ] She has a black belt in taekwondo. [24]
Adi Shamir is an Israeli cryptographer and inventor. He is a co-inventor of the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm, a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme, one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer science.
Malleability is a property of some cryptographic algorithms. An encryption algorithm is "malleable" if it is possible to transform a ciphertext into another ciphertext which decrypts to a related plaintext. That is, given an encryption of a plaintext , it is possible to generate another ciphertext which decrypts to , for a known function , without necessarily knowing or learning .
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The Cramer–Shoup system is an asymmetric key encryption algorithm, and was the first efficient scheme proven to be secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack using standard cryptographic assumptions. Its security is based on the computational intractability of the Decisional Diffie–Hellman assumption. Developed by Ronald Cramer and Victor Shoup in 1998, it is an extension of the ElGamal cryptosystem. In contrast to ElGamal, which is extremely malleable, Cramer–Shoup adds other elements to ensure non-malleability even against a resourceful attacker. This non-malleability is achieved through the use of a universal one-way hash function and additional computations, resulting in a ciphertext which is twice as large as in ElGamal.
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Larry Joseph Stockmeyer was an American computer scientist. He was one of the pioneers in the field of computational complexity theory, and he also worked in the field of distributed computing. He died of pancreatic cancer.
Differential privacy (DP) is a mathematically rigorous framework for releasing statistical information about datasets while protecting the privacy of individual data subjects. It enables a data holder to share aggregate patterns of the group while limiting information that is leaked about specific individuals. This is done by injecting carefully calibrated noise into statistical computations such that the utility of the statistic is preserved while provably limiting what can be inferred about any individual in the dataset.
Toniann Pitassi is a Canadian-American mathematician and computer scientist specializing in computational complexity theory. She is currently Jeffrey L. and Brenda Bleustein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University and was Bell Research Chair at the University of Toronto.
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Mordechai M. "Moti" Yung is a cryptographer and computer scientist known for his work on cryptovirology and kleptography.
Tal Rabin is a computer scientist and Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a Director at Amazon Web Services (AWS). She was previously the head of research at the Algorand Foundation and the head of the cryptography research group at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center.
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Kobbi Nissim is a computer scientist at Georgetown University, where he is the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science. His areas of research include cryptography and data privacy. He is known for the introduction of differential privacy.