Silvio Micali

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Silvio Micali
Silvio Micali.jpg
Born (1954-10-13) October 13, 1954 (age 70)
Palermo, Italy
Nationality Italian
Education Sapienza University (BS)
University of California, Berkeley (MS, PhD)
Known for Blum–Micali algorithm
Goldwasser–Micali cryptosystem
GMR algorithm
Zero-knowledge proof [1]
Claw-free permutation
Pseudorandom Functions
Peppercoin
Algorand
Semantic security
Verifiable secret sharing
Awards
Scientific career
Fields Computer Science
Cryptography
Institutions University of Toronto
University of Pennsylvania
Tsinghua University
MIT CS & AI Lab
Thesis Randomness versus Hardness  (1983)
Doctoral advisor Manuel Blum [2]
Doctoral students
Website people.csail.mit.edu/silvio

Silvio Micali (born October 13, 1954) 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. [4] [5]

Contents

In 2012, he received the Turing Award for his work in cryptography. [6] [1]

Personal life

Micali graduated in mathematics at La Sapienza University of Rome in 1978 and earned a PhD degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982; [7] for research supervised by Manuel Blum. [2] Micali has been on the faculty of MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department since 1983. He has also served on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, University of Toronto, and Tsinghua University. [8] His research interests are cryptography, zero knowledge, pseudorandom generation, secure protocols, and mechanism design.

Career

Micali is best known for some of his fundamental early work on public-key cryptosystems, pseudorandom functions, digital signatures, oblivious transfer, secure multiparty computation, and is one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs. [9]

While a graduate student, Micali collaborated with another student, Shafi Goldwasser, to introduce the concept of probabilistic encryption. In this scheme, a message can be encrypted randomly to multiple different ciphertexts, providing semantic security because a pair of ciphertexts are indistinguishable even when an attacker can choose which messages they come from. [10] Micali and his advisor Manuel Blum also developed a pseudorandom generator at this time, the Blum-Micali algorithm. [11]

Micali, Goldwasser, and Charles Rackoff invented interactive proofs in the 1980s, at the same time as László Babai and Shlomo Moran. [12] In an interactive proof system, participants develop a proof by answering a series of questions. [10] Micali, Goldwasser, and Rackoff then introduced a special class of these, zero-knowledge proofs, in 1985. They defined a system where a prover interacts with a verifier to prove some theorem, without providing any additional knowledge to the verifier. [13]

Micali's former doctoral students include Mihir Bellare, Bonnie Berger, Shai Halevi, Rafail Ostrovsky, and Phillip Rogaway. [2] [3]

In 2001, Micali co-founded CoreStreet Ltd, a software company originally based in Cambridge, Massachusetts which implemented Micali's patents involving checking the status of digital certificates (mainly applicable to large enterprise and government-sized digital and physical identity projects). Micali served as Chief Scientist at CoreStreet. CoreStreet was bought by ActivIdentity in 2009. [14]

In the early 2000s, Micali also founded Peppercoin, a micropayments system which was acquired in 2007. In 2017, he founded Algorand. [15]

Awards and honors

Micali won the Gödel Prize in 1993, along with Goldwasser, Rackoff, Babai and Moran, for their work inventing interactive proofs. [12] He received the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics in 2004. [16] In 2007, he was selected to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [17]

He received the Turing Award [1] for the year 2012 along with Shafi Goldwasser for their work in the field of cryptography. [18] The Turing Award is considered the Nobel Prize of computing. [19]

In 2015 the University of Salerno acknowledged his studies by giving him an honoris causa degree in Computer Science. He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2017. [20]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Savage, Neil (2013). "Proofs probable: Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali laid the foundations for modern cryptography, with contributions including interactive and zero-knowledge proofs". Communications of the ACM. 56 (6): 22. doi:10.1145/2461256.2461265. S2CID   26769891. Closed Access logo transparent.svg
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Silvio Micali at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. 1 2 "CV" (PDF). people.csail.mit.edu.
  4. ↑ Silvio Micali at DBLP Bibliography Server OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  5. ↑ Silvio Micali author profile page at the ACM Digital Library
  6. ↑ "Goldwasser and Micali win Turing Award". MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2013-03-13. Retrieved 2024-12-26.
  7. ↑ "Silvio's Home Page". people.csail.mit.edu. Retrieved 2018-03-12.
  8. ↑ "Sylvio Micali". amturing.acm. Retrieved 14 August 2023.
  9. ↑ Blum, M.; Feldman, P.; Micali, S. (1988). "Non-interactive zero-knowledge and its applications". Proceedings of the twentieth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing - STOC '88. p. 103. doi:10.1145/62212.62222. ISBN   0897912640. S2CID   7282320.
  10. 1 2 Garfinkel, Simon (August 21, 2019). "Shafi Goldwasser: The number theory expert who helped revolutionize cryptography". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2025-08-23.
  11. ↑ Moshkovitz, Dana (Fall 2012). "Lecture 20: P vs BPP 1" (PDF). MIT: Advanced Complexity Theory. Retrieved 2025-08-23.
  12. 1 2 Parberry, Ian. "1993 Gödel Prize". ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory. Archived from the original on 2015-12-08. Retrieved 2025-08-23.
  13. ↑ Goldreich, Oded; Oren, Yair (1994-12-01). "Definitions and properties of zero-knowledge proof systems" . Journal of Cryptology. 7 (1): 1–32. doi:10.1007/BF00195207. ISSN   1432-1378.
  14. ↑ "CoreStreet Founder Wins Award".
  15. ↑ "Silvio Micali | MIT CSAIL". www.csail.mit.edu. Retrieved 2021-05-10.
  16. ↑ "RSA conference award for mathematics". cseweb.ucsd.edu. Archived from the original on 2019-12-05. Retrieved 2020-08-31.
  17. ↑ "MIT CSAIL Theory of Computation". theory.csail.mit.edu. Retrieved 2018-03-12.
  18. ↑ "Goldwasser, Micali Receive ACM Turing Award for Advances in Cryptography". ACM. Archived from the original on 16 March 2013. Retrieved 13 March 2013.
  19. ↑ Garfinkel, Simon (August 21, 2019). "Shafi Goldwasser: The number theory expert who helped revolutionize cryptography". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 2025-08-23.
  20. ↑ ACM Recognizes 2017 Fellows for Making Transformative Contributions and Advancing Technology in the Digital Age, Association for Computing Machinery, December 11, 2017, retrieved 2017-11-13
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