Cryptography

Adam D. Smith

Adam D. Smith is an American theoretical computer scientist and Boston University professor, co-inventor of differential privacy, honored with the Gödel Prize in 2017 and the ACM Paris Kanellakis Award in 2021.

Adi Shamir

Adi Shamir, born 1952 in Tel Aviv, is an Israeli cryptographer at the Weizmann Institute who co-invented RSA in 1977 and received the 2002 Turing Award.

Auguste Kerckhoffs

Auguste Kerckhoffs (1835–1903) was a Dutch-born linguist and cryptologist teaching in Paris whose 1883 article La cryptographie militaire set out six conditions for military ciphers, one becoming Kerckhoffs's principle.

Charles Rackoff

Charles Rackoff, born in 1948, is a cryptographer and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto who co-originated zero-knowledge proofs with Goldwasser and Micali, co-winning the 1993 Gödel Prize.

Craig Costello

Craig Costello is an Australian cryptographer known for isogeny-based post-quantum cryptography; he helped develop SIKE, which was broken in 2022, and is now a professor at QUT.

Craig Gentry

Craig Gentry is an American cryptographer who constructed the first fully homomorphic encryption scheme in 2009, solving a 1978 open problem, and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2014.

Cynthia Dwork

Cynthia Dwork, born 1958, is an American computer scientist and Harvard professor known for defining differential privacy, foundational work in cryptography, and the 2024 National Medal of Science.

Dan Boneh

Dan Boneh (דן בונה) is a cryptographer and Stanford professor who heads the Applied Cryptography Group and is known for pairing-based cryptography and BLS signatures.

Danny Dolev

Danny Dolev is a computer scientist and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, known for the Dolev–Strong broadcast protocol, the Dolev–Yao adversary model, and Byzantine agreement lower bounds.

David Pointcheval

David Pointcheval is a French cryptographer, a CNRS researcher at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris known for the forking lemma and repairing the RSA-OAEP security proof.

Frank McSherry

Frank McSherry is an American computer scientist who co-invented differential privacy, led the Naiad and timely dataflow project at Microsoft Research, and is now Chief Scientist at Materialize.

Jacques Stern (French cryptographer)

Jacques Stern, born 1949 in Paris, is a French cryptographer and professor at the École Normale Supérieure, called the father of the French school of cryptology and winner of the 2006 CNRS Gold Medal.

Kobbi Nissim

Kobbi Nissim is a computer scientist, professor at Georgetown University, and co-introducer of differential privacy, the privacy framework used in the 2020 US Census; he won the 2017 Gödel Prize.

Leonard Adleman

Leonard Adleman, born 1945, is an American computer scientist at the University of Southern California who co-invented the RSA cryptosystem in 1977 and founded DNA computing in 1994.

Martin Edward Hellman

Martin Edward Hellman, born in New York in 1945, is an American cryptographer and Stanford professor emeritus who co-invented public-key cryptography, winning the 2015 Turing Award with Whitfield Diffie.

Matthew K. Franklin

Matthew K. Franklin is an American applied cryptographer and Professor of Computer Science at UC Davis, known for identity-based encryption from the Weil pairing and threshold RSA key generation.

Michael O. Rabin (מיכאל אוסר רבין)

Michael O. Rabin (מיכאל אוסר רבין), born 1931, was an Israeli computer scientist at Hebrew University and Harvard who won the 1976 Turing Award for automata theory and pioneered randomized algorithms and cryptography.

Moni Naor

Moni Naor (מוני נאור) is an Israeli computer scientist and cryptographer, professor and dean at the Weizmann Institute, known for work on pseudorandom functions and proof of work.

Nick Szabo

Nick Szabo is an American computer scientist and cryptographer who coined the term smart contract in 1994 and designed Bit Gold, a precursor to Bitcoin.

Oded Goldreich

Oded Goldreich is an Israeli computer scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science known for zero-knowledge proofs and secure computation, winner of the 2021 Israel Prize.

Oded Regev (computer scientist)

Oded Regev is a theoretical computer scientist and professor at New York University's Courant Institute, known for introducing the Learning with Errors problem in 2005.

Paul Kocher (cryptographer)

Paul Kocher is an American cryptographer who discovered timing attacks and differential power analysis, contributed to SSL 3.0, and founded Cryptography Research, Inc., sold to Rambus in 2011.

Phil Zimmermann

Phil Zimmermann (Philip R. Zimmermann) is an American cryptographer who created PGP in 1991, faced a US criminal investigation over its export, and later founded PGP Inc. and Silent Circle.

Ralph Merkle

Ralph Merkle, born 1952 in Berkeley, California, is an American computer scientist who independently invented public-key cryptography in 1974 and created the Merkle tree data structure.

Ron Rivest

Ron Rivest, born 1947 in Schenectady, New York, is an American computer scientist at MIT who co-invented the RSA cryptosystem, winning the 2002 Turing Award.

Shafi Goldwasser

Shafi Goldwasser, also known as Shafrira Goldwasser (שפרירה גולדווסר), is an Israeli-American cryptographer who introduced probabilistic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs, winning the 2012 Turing Award with Silvio Micali.

Shafrira Goldwasser

Shafrira Goldwasser, known as Shafi Goldwasser, is a cryptographer who won the 2012 Turing Award with Silvio Micali for laying the complexity-theoretic foundations of modern cryptography.

Silvio Micali

Silvio Micali, born in Palermo, Italy in 1954, is an MIT computer scientist known for co-inventing zero-knowledge proofs and probabilistic encryption and for winning the 2012 Turing Award.

Stephen Pohlig

Stephen Pohlig (died 2017) was an American cryptographer who earned his PhD at Stanford under Martin Hellman in 1978 and co-invented the Pohlig–Hellman discrete-logarithm algorithm and a related exponentiation cipher.