Contents
Adi Shamir
Co-inventing RSA public-key cryptography and developing influential methods for sharing and analysing secrets.
RSA · Secret sharing
- Born
- 6 July 1952
- Birthplace
- Tel Aviv, Israel
More people
Adi Shamir
Adi Shamir works on both the construction and the breaking of cryptographic systems. His research with Ron Rivest and Leonard Adleman helped make public-key security practical, while later work exposed weaknesses in other approaches.
Early life
Mathematics studies
Earned a mathematics degree at Tel Aviv University in 1973.
Doctoral training
Completed postgraduate computer-science studies at the Weizmann Institute, receiving his doctorate in 1977.
Career
- 1970s
Research abroad
Worked at Warwick and MIT, collaborating on the RSA cryptosystem.
- 1980
Weizmann faculty
Returned to Israel and developed a long-running cryptography research programme.
- 1980s onward
Security analysis
Investigated secret sharing, cipher attacks and information leaked by physical implementations.
Contributions
RSA
With Rivest and Adleman, devised a practical public-key cryptographic method.
Secret sharing
Showed how to split a secret so a specified number of shares is needed to reconstruct it.
Differential cryptanalysis
With Eli Biham, developed a powerful way to analyse block ciphers.
Beyond cryptography
Beyond encryption
His theoretical work also established a major connection between interactive proofs and space-bounded computation.
Scientific exchange
After a visa delay prevented him attending the 2019 RSA Conference, he publicly questioned barriers to researchers travelling.
Sources & photo credit
Life, career and references ↗Institutional biography and research ↗Photo: Duncan.Hull. CC BY-SA 4.0 · Original image. Cropped and displayed in monochrome.
