Ralph C. Merkle is a 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.
In cryptography, an oblivious transfer (OT) protocol is a type of protocol in which a sender transfers one of potentially many pieces of information to a receiver, but remains oblivious as to what piece has been transferred.
Shafrira Goldwasser is an Israeli-American computer scientist and winner of the Turing Award in 2012. She is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; a professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel; the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley; and co-founder and chief scientist of Duality Technologies.
In cryptography, a private information retrieval (PIR) protocol is a protocol that allows a user to retrieve an item from a server in possession of a database without revealing which item is retrieved. PIR is a weaker version of 1-out-of-n oblivious transfer, where it is also required that the user should not get information about other database items.
Silvio Micali is an Italian computer scientist, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the founder of Algorand, a proof-of-stake blockchain cryptocurrency protocol. Micali's research at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory centers on cryptography and information security.
The Donald E. Knuth Prize is a prize for outstanding contributions to the foundations of computer science, named after the American computer scientist Donald E. Knuth.
Michael George Luby is a mathematician and computer scientist, CEO of BitRipple, Senior Research Scientist at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), former VP Technology at Qualcomm, co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer of Digital Fountain. In coding theory he is known for leading the invention of the Tornado codes and the LT codes. In cryptography he is known for his contributions showing that any one-way function can be used as the basis for private cryptography, and for his analysis, in collaboration with Charles Rackoff, of the Feistel cipher construction. His distributed algorithm to find a maximal independent set in a computer network has also been influential.
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.
Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs are cryptographic primitives, where information between a prover and a verifier can be authenticated by the prover, without revealing any of the specific information beyond the validity of the statement itself. This function of encryption makes direct communication between the prover and verifier unnecessary, effectively removing any intermediaries. The core trustless cryptography "proofing" involves a hash function generation of a random number, constrained within mathematical parameters determined by the prover and verifier.
Cynthia Dwork is an American computer scientist best known for her contributions to cryptography, distributed computing, and algorithmic fairness. She is one of the inventors of differential privacy and proof-of-work.
Ueli Maurer is a professor of cryptography at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.
Mordechai M. "Moti" Yung is a cryptographer and computer scientist known for his work on cryptovirology and kleptography.
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.
Tal Rabin is a computer scientist and Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. 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.
Amit Sahai is an American computer scientist. He is a professor of computer science at UCLA and the director of the Center for Encrypted Functionalities.
Bhavani Thuraisingham is the Louis A. Beecherl, Jr. Distinguished Professor of computer science and the executive director of the Cyber Security Research and Education Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is a visiting senior research fellow in the Department of Informatics at Kings College University of London and a 2017–2018 Cyber Security Policy Fellow at New America.
An oblivious RAM (ORAM) simulator is a compiler that transforms algorithms in such a way that the resulting algorithms preserve the input-output behavior of the original algorithm but the distribution of memory access pattern of the transformed algorithm is independent of the memory access pattern of the original algorithm.
Jan Leonhard Camenisch is a Swiss research scientist in cryptography and privacy and is currently the CTO of DFINITY. He previously worked at IBM Research – Zurich, Switzerland and has published over 100 widely cited scientific articles and holds more than 70 U.S. patents.
Sushil Jajodia is a computer scientist known for his work on cyber security and privacy, databases, and distributed systems.
