Moti Yung | |
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Alma mater | Columbia University |
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Scientific career | |
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Thesis | Minimum-Knowledge Transfer Protocol (1988) |
Doctoral advisor | Zvi Galil |
Doctoral students |
Mordechai M. "Moti" Yung is a cryptographer and computer scientist known for his work on cryptovirology and kleptography.
Yung earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1988 under the supervision of Zvi Galil. [1] In the past, he worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, [2] CertCo, RSA Laboratories, and Google. [3] In 2016, Yung moved from Google to Snap Inc. [4] Yung is currently a research scientist at Google. [5]
Yung is an adjunct senior research faculty member at Columbia University, [5] and has co-advised PhD students including Gödel Prize winner Matthew K. Franklin, Jonathan Katz, and Aggelos Kiayias. [1]
Yung research covers primarily the area of cryptography and its applications to information security and data privacy. He has worked on defining and implementing malicious (offensive) cryptography: cryptovirology [6] and kleptography, [7] and on various other foundational and applied fields of cryptographic research, including: user and entity electronic authentication, [8] [9] information-theoretic security, [10] [11] secure multi-party computation, [12] [13] [14] [15] threshold cryptosystems, [16] [17] and zero-knowledge proofs, [18] [19] [20]
In 1996, Adam L. Young and Yung coined the term cryptovirology to denote the use of cryptography as an attack weapon via computer viruses and other malware in contrast to its traditional protective role. [6] In particular, they described the first instances of ransomware using public-key cryptography. [21] [22]
In 1996, Adam L. Young and Yung introduced the notion of kleptography [7] to show how cryptography could be used to attack host cryptosystems where the malicious resulting system with the embedded cryptologic tool in it resists reverse-engineering and cannot be detected by interacting with the host cryptosystem, [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] as an argument against cryptographic systems and devices given by an external body as "black boxes" as was the Clipper chip and the Capstone program. [28]
After the 2013 Snowden affair, the NIST was believed to have mounted the first kleptographic attack against the American Federal Information Processing Standard detailing the Dual EC DRBG, [29] essentially exploiting the repeated discrete logarithm based "kleptogram" introduced by Young and Yung. [30]
Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is the field of cryptographic systems that use pairs of related keys. Each key pair consists of a public key and a corresponding private key. Key pairs are generated with cryptographic algorithms based on mathematical problems termed one-way functions. Security of public-key cryptography depends on keeping the private key secret; the public key can be openly distributed without compromising security. There are many kinds of public-key cryptosystems, with different security goals, including digital signature, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, public-key key encapsulation, and public-key encryption.
Ralph C. Merkle is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is one of the inventors of public-key cryptography, the inventor of cryptographic hashing, and more recently a researcher and speaker on cryonics.
A chosen-ciphertext attack (CCA) is an attack model for cryptanalysis where the cryptanalyst can gather information by obtaining the decryptions of chosen ciphertexts. From these pieces of information the adversary can attempt to recover the secret key used for decryption.
Articles related to cryptography include:
Kleptography is the study of stealing information securely and subliminally. The term was introduced by Adam Young and Moti Yung in the Proceedings of Advances in Cryptology – Crypto '96. Kleptography is a subfield of cryptovirology and is a natural extension of the theory of subliminal channels that was pioneered by Gus Simmons while at Sandia National Laboratory. A kleptographic backdoor is synonymously referred to as an asymmetric backdoor. Kleptography encompasses secure and covert communications through cryptosystems and cryptographic protocols. This is reminiscent of, but not the same as steganography that studies covert communications through graphics, video, digital audio data, and so forth.
Authenticated Encryption (AE) is an encryption scheme which simultaneously assures the data confidentiality and authenticity. Examples of encryption modes that provide AE are GCM, CCM.
Cryptovirology refers to the study of cryptography use in malware, such as ransomware and asymmetric backdoors. Traditionally, cryptography and its applications are defensive in nature, and provide privacy, authentication, and security to users. Cryptovirology employs a twist on cryptography, showing that it can also be used offensively. It can be used to mount extortion based attacks that cause loss of access to information, loss of confidentiality, and information leakage, tasks which cryptography typically prevents.
Homomorphic encryption is a form of encryption that allows computations to be performed on encrypted data without first having to decrypt it. The resulting computations are left in an encrypted form which, when decrypted, result in an output that is identical to that of the operations performed on the unencrypted data. While homomorphic encryption does not protect against side-channel attacks that observe behavior, it can be used for privacy-preserving outsourced storage and computation. This allows data to be encrypted and outsourced to commercial cloud environments for processing, all while encrypted.
Secure two-party computation (2PC) a.k.a. Secure function evaluation is sub-problem of secure multi-party computation (MPC) that has received special attention by researchers because of its close relation to many cryptographic tasks. The goal of 2PC is to create a generic protocol that allows two parties to jointly compute an arbitrary function on their inputs without sharing the value of their inputs with the opposing party. One of the most well known examples of 2PC is Yao's Millionaires' problem, in which two parties, Alice and Bob, are millionaires who wish to determine who is wealthier without revealing their wealth. Formally, Alice has wealth , Bob has wealth , and they wish to compute without revealing the values or .
A threshold cryptosystem, the basis for the field of threshold cryptography, is a cryptosystem that protects information by encrypting it and distributing it among a cluster of fault-tolerant computers. The message is encrypted using a public key, and the corresponding private key is shared among the participating parties. With a threshold cryptosystem, in order to decrypt an encrypted message or to sign a message, several parties must cooperate in the decryption or signature protocol.
Moni Naor is an Israeli computer scientist, currently a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Naor received his Ph.D. in 1989 at the University of California, Berkeley. His advisor was Manuel Blum.
Lattice-based cryptography is the generic term for constructions of cryptographic primitives that involve lattices, either in the construction itself or in the security proof. Lattice-based constructions support important standards of post-quantum cryptography. Unlike more widely used and known public-key schemes such as the RSA, Diffie-Hellman or elliptic-curve cryptosystems — which could, theoretically, be defeated using Shor's algorithm on a quantum computer — some lattice-based constructions appear to be resistant to attack by both classical and quantum computers. Furthermore, many lattice-based constructions are considered to be secure under the assumption that certain well-studied computational lattice problems cannot be solved efficiently.
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC), sometimes referred to as quantum-proof, quantum-safe, or quantum-resistant, is the development of cryptographic algorithms that are currently thought to be secure against a cryptanalytic attack by a quantum computer. Most widely-used public-key algorithms rely on the difficulty of one of three mathematical problems: the integer factorization problem, the discrete logarithm problem or the elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem. All of these problems could be easily solved on a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor's algorithm or even faster and less demanding alternatives.
Matthew Keith "Matt" Franklin is an American cryptographer, and a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis.
Jonathan Katz is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland who conducts research on cryptography and cybersecurity. In 2019–2020 he was a faculty member in the Volgenau School of Engineering at George Mason University, where he held the title of Eminent Scholar in Cybersecurity. In 2013–2019 he was director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center at the University of Maryland.
Amit Sahai is an Indian-American computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science at UCLA and the director of the Center for Encrypted Functionalities.
Shai Halevi is a computer scientist who works on cryptography research at Amazon Web Services.
Ran Canetti is a professor of Computer Science at Boston University. and the director of the Check Point Institute for Information Security and of the Center for Reliable Information System and Cyber Security. He is also associate editor of the Journal of Cryptology and Information and Computation. His main areas of research span cryptography and information security, with an emphasis on the design, analysis and use of cryptographic protocols.
Aggelos Kiayias is a Greek cryptographer and computer scientist, currently a professor at the University of Edinburgh and the Chief Science Officer at Input Output Global, the blockchain company that developed Cardano.
Hugo Krawczyk is an Argentine-Israeli cryptographer best known for co-inventing the HMAC message authentication algorithm and contributing in fundamental ways to the cryptographic architecture of central Internet standards, including IPsec, IKE, and SSL/TLS. In particular, both IKEv2 and TLS 1.3 use Krawczyk’s SIGMA protocol as the cryptographic core of their key exchange procedures. He has also contributed foundational work in the areas of threshold and proactive cryptosystems and searchable symmetric encryption, among others.