Ron Rivest
Ron Rivest | |
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Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Thesis | Analysis of associative retrieval algorithms (1974) |
Doctoral advisor | Robert W. Floyd |
Doctoral students | |
Website | people |
Ronald Linn Rivest (/rɪˈvɛst/;[3][4] born May 6, 1947) is a cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an
Along with
Education
Rivest earned a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from Yale University in 1969, and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Stanford University in 1974 for research supervised by Robert W. Floyd.[1]
Career
At MIT, Rivest is a member of the Theory of Computation Group, and founder of MIT CSAIL's Cryptography and Information Security Group.
Rivest was a founder of
His former doctoral students include Avrim Blum, Benny Chor, Sally Goldman, Burt Kaliski, Anna Lysyanskaya, Ron Pinter, Robert Schapire, Alan Sherman,[1] and Mona Singh.[2]
Research
Rivest is especially known for his research in cryptography. He has also made significant contributions to algorithm design, to the computational complexity of machine learning, and to election security.
Cryptography
The publication of the RSA cryptosystem by Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman in 1978[C1] revolutionized modern cryptography by providing the first usable and publicly described method for public-key cryptography. The three authors won the 2002 Turing Award, the top award in computer science, for this work. The award cited "their ingenious contribution to making public-key cryptography useful in practice".[6] The same paper that introduced this cryptosystem also introduced Alice and Bob, the fictional heroes of many subsequent cryptographic protocols.[7] In the same year, Rivest, Adleman, and Michael Dertouzos first formulated homomorphic encryption and its applications in secure cloud computing,[C2] an idea that would not come to fruition until over 40 years later when secure homomorphic encryption algorithms were finally developed.[8]
Rivest was one of the inventors of the GMR public signature scheme, published with Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali in 1988,[C3][9] and of
Other contributions of Rivest to cryptography include chaffing and winnowing, the interlock protocol for authenticating anonymous key-exchange, cryptographic time capsules such as LCS35 based on anticipated improvements to computation speed through Moore's law, key whitening and its application through the xor–encrypt–xor key mode in extending the Data Encryption Standard to DES-X, and the Peppercoin system for cryptographic micropayments.
Algorithms
In 1973, Rivest and his coauthors published the first
Rivest's 1974 doctoral dissertation concerned the use of
He is a co-author of Introduction to Algorithms (also known as CLRS), a standard textbook on algorithms, with Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson and Clifford Stein. First published in 1990, it has extended into four editions, the latest in 2022.[A7]
Learning
In the problem of
Elections
A significant topic in Rivest's more recent research has been election security, based on the principle of software independence: that the security of elections should be founded on physical records, so that hidden changes to software used in voting systems cannot result in undetectable changes to election outcomes. His research in this area includes improving the robustness of mix networks in this application,[V1] the 2006 invention of the ThreeBallot paper ballot based end-to-end auditable voting system (which he released into public domain in the interest of promoting democracy),[V2][6] and the development of the Scantegrity security system for optical scan voting systems.[V3]
He was a member of the Election Assistance Commission's Technical Guidelines Development Committee.[14]
Honors and awards
Rivest is a member of the
Selected publications
Rivest's publications include:
Algorithms
A1. | MR 0329916 . Previously announced as "Linear time bounds for median computations", STOC 1972. |
A2. | S2CID 3064709 . See also "Algorithm 489: the algorithm SELECT—for finding the th smallest of elements", p. 173, . |
A3. | Rivest, Ronald L. (1976). "Partial-match retrieval algorithms".
MR 0395398 . Previously announced at the 15th Annual Symposium on Switching and Automata Theory, 1974. |
A4. | Rivest, Ronald (1976). "On self-organizing sequential search heuristics".
S2CID 498886 . Previously announced at the 15th Annual Symposium on Switching and Automata Theory, 1974. |
A5. | MR 0592771 . |
A6. | Rivest, Ronald L.; Fiduccia, Charles M. (1982). "A "greedy" channel router". In Crabbe, James S.; Radke, Charles E.; Ofek, Hillel (eds.). Proceedings of the 19th Design Automation Conference, DAC '82, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, June 14–16, 1982. ACM and IEEE. pp. 418–424. .
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A7. | ISBN 0-262-03141-8. 2nd edition, with Clifford Stein , 2001. 3rd edition, 2009. 4th edition, 2022. |
Cryptography
C1. | Rivest, R. L.;
S2CID 2873616 . |
C2. | Rivest, R.; Adleman, L.; Dertouzos, M. (1978). "On data banks and privacy homomorphisms". In DeMillo, Richard A. (ed.). Foundations of Secure Computation. Academic Press. pp. 169–177.
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C3. | S2CID 1715998 . Previously announced as "A 'paradoxical' solution to the signature problem", FOCS 1984 and CRYPTO 1984. |
C4. | Rivest, Ronald L. (October 1990). The MD4 Message Digest Algorithm. Network Working Group. .
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C5. | Rivest, Ronald L. (April 1992). The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm. Network Working Group. .
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C6. | Rivest, Ronald L. (March 1998). A Description of the RC2(r) Encryption Algorithm. Network Working Group. .
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C7. | Rivest, Ronald L.; .
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C8. | Rivest, Ronald L. (1994). "The RC5 encryption algorithm". In Preneel, Bart (ed.). Fast Software Encryption: Second International Workshop. Leuven, Belgium, 14–16 December 1994, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 1008. Springer. pp. 86–96. .
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Learning
L1. | Hyafil, Laurent; Rivest, Ronald L. (May 1976). "Constructing optimal binary decision trees is NP-complete".
MR 0413598 . |
L2. | Rivest, Ronald L. (1987). "Learning decision lists".
S2CID 2840541 . |
L3. | S2CID 8567973 . Previously in NIPS 1988. |
L4. | MR 0984483 . |
L5. | Rivest, Ronald L.;
MR 1216458 . Previously announced at STOC 1989. |
Elections and voting
V1. | Jakobsson, Markus; Juels, Ari; Rivest, Ronald L. (2002). "Making mix nets robust for electronic voting by randomized partial checking". In Boneh, Dan (ed.). Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Security Symposium, San Francisco, CA, USA, August 5-9, 2002. Boston, Massachusetts: USENIX Association. pp. 339–353.
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V2. | Rivest, Ronald L.; Smith, Warren D. (August 2007). "Three voting protocols: ThreeBallot, VAV, and Twin" (PDF). 2007 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop (EVT 07). Boston, Massachusetts: USENIX Association.
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V3. | Chaum, David; Carback, Richard; Clark, Jeremy; Essex, Aleksander; Popoveniuc, Stefan; Rivest, Ronald L.; Ryan, Peter Y. A.; Shen, Emily; Sherman, Alan T. (2008). "Scantegrity II: end-to-end verifiability for optical scan election systems using invisible ink confirmation codes" (PDF). In Dill, David L.; Kohno, Tadayoshi (eds.). 2008 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Workshop, EVT 2008, July 28-29, 2008, San Jose, CA, USA, Proceedings. Boston, Massachusetts: USENIX Association.
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Personal life
His son is Chris Rivest, entrepreneur and company co-founder.[17]
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Ron Rivest at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ OCLC 680493381.
- ^ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: RSA Conference (February 25, 2014). "The Cryptographers' Panel" – via YouTube.
- ^ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: "Faculty Forum Online: Ron Rivest". YouTube.
- ^ Dizikes, Peter (June 29, 2015). "Chisholm, Rivest, and Thompson appointed as new Institute Professors: Biologist, computer scientist, and musician awarded MIT's highest faculty honor". MIT News. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- ^ a b "Ronald (Ron) Linn Rivest". ACM Turing Award laureates. Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved April 15, 2023.
- JSTOR 43707638.
- S2CID 11182158. See especially p. 47: "The concept of FHE was introduced by Rivest under the name privacy homomorphisms. The problem of constructing a scheme with these properties remained unsolved until 2009, when Gentry presented his breakthrough result."
- ISBN 0-8493-8523-7.
- .
- .
- S2CID 10947879.
- S2CID 2494305.
- ^ "TGDC members". National Institute of Standards and Technology. May 6, 2009. Archived from the original on June 8, 2007.
- ^ Biography. Archived from the original on 2011-12-06.
- ^ "Chisholm, Rivest, and Thompson appointed as new Institute Professors". MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. June 29, 2015.
- ^ Cf. Acknowledgements, p.xxi, in Cormen, Rivest, et al., Introduction to Algorithms, MIT Press