Ronald Linn Rivest is an American cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
In computational complexity theory, an interactive proof system is an abstract machine that models computation as the exchange of messages between two parties: a prover and a verifier. The parties interact by exchanging messages in order to ascertain whether a given string belongs to a language or not. The prover is assumed to possess unlimited computational resources but cannot be trusted, while the verifier has bounded computation power but is assumed to be always honest. Messages are sent between the verifier and prover until the verifier has an answer to the problem and has "convinced" itself that it is correct.
Manuel Blum is a Venezuelan born American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1995 "In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and program checking".
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Housed within the Ray and Maria Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research.
In cryptography, a zero-knowledge proof is a protocol in which one party can convince another party that some given statement is true, without conveying to the verifier any information beyond the mere fact of that statement's truth. The intuition underlying zero-knowledge proofs is that it is trivial to prove possession of the relevant information simply by revealing it; the hard part is to prove this possession without revealing this information.
Shafrira Goldwasser is an Israeli-American computer scientist. A winner of the Turing Award in 2012, she is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; a professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science; 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 verifiable random function (VRF) is a public-key pseudorandom function that provides proofs that its outputs were calculated correctly. The owner of the secret key can compute the function value as well as an associated proof for any input value. Everyone else, using the proof and the associated public key, can check that this value was indeed calculated correctly, yet this information cannot be used to find the secret key.
The Goldwasser–Micali (GM) cryptosystem is an asymmetric key encryption algorithm developed by Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali in 1982. GM has the distinction of being the first probabilistic public-key encryption scheme which is provably secure under standard cryptographic assumptions. However, it is not an efficient cryptosystem, as ciphertexts may be several hundred times larger than the initial plaintext. To prove the security properties of the cryptosystem, Goldwasser and Micali proposed the widely used definition of semantic security.
Oded Goldreich is a professor of computer science at the faculty of mathematics and computer science of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. His research interests lie within the theory of computation and are, specifically, the interplay of randomness and computation, the foundations of cryptography, and computational complexity theory. He won the Knuth Prize in 2017 and was selected in 2021 to receive the Israel Prize in mathematics.
Charles Weill Rackoff is an American cryptologist. Born and raised in New York City, he attended MIT as both an undergraduate and graduate student, and earned a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1974. He spent a year as a postdoctoral scholar at INRIA in France.
Avi Wigderson is an Israeli computer scientist and mathematician. He is the Herbert H. Maass Professor in the school of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America. His research interests include complexity theory, parallel algorithms, graph theory, cryptography, and distributed computing. Wigderson received the Abel Prize in 2021 for his work in theoretical computer science. He also received the 2023 Turing Award for his contributions to the understanding of randomness in the theory of computation.
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.
The Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) is an academic conference in the field of theoretical computer science. STOC has been organized annually since 1969, typically in May or June; the conference is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery special interest group SIGACT. Acceptance rate of STOC, averaged from 1970 to 2012, is 31%, with the rate of 29% in 2012.
Salil Vadhan is an American computer scientist. He is Vicky Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. After completing his undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Computer Science at Harvard in 1995, he obtained his PhD in Applied Mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999, where his advisor was Shafi Goldwasser. His research centers around the interface between computational complexity theory and cryptography. He focuses on the topics of pseudorandomness and zero-knowledge proofs. His work on the zig-zag product, with Omer Reingold and Avi Wigderson, was awarded the 2009 Gödel Prize.
Nir Shavit is an Israeli computer scientist. He is a professor in the Computer Science Department at Tel Aviv University and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Shlomo Moran is an Israeli computer scientist, the Bernard Elkin Chair in Computer Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel.
Yael Tauman Kalai is a cryptographer and theoretical computer scientist and is the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Prior to that, she worked as a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England.
Vinod Vaikuntanathan is a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a principal investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His work is focused on cryptography, including homomorphic encryption. He is the co-recipient of the 2022 Gödel Prize, together with Zvika Brakerski and Craig Gentry. He also co-founded the data start-up Duality, which utilizes technologies he developed revolving around homomorphic encryption.
