| Ronald L. Rivest | |
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Ronald Rivest (middle), with Alan Sherman (left) and David Chaum (right), 2007
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| Born | 1947 Schenectady, New York |
| Residence | United States |
| Fields | Cryptography |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Alma mater | Stanford University Yale University |
| Doctoral advisor | Robert W. Floyd |
| Doctoral students | Ben Adida Javed Aslam Alan Baratz Paul Bayer Margrit Betke Avrim Blum Stephen Boyack Victor Boyko Ben-Zion Chor Kevin Fu Igal Galperin Sally Goldman Jonathan Herzog Susan Hohenberger Burt Kaliski Andrea LaPaugh Errol Lloyd Anna Lysyanskaya Ron Pinter Zulfikar Ramzan Robert Schapire Alan Sherman Mona Singh Robert Sloan Donna Slonim Andrew Sutherland Stephen Weis |
| Known for | Public-key RSA, RC2, RC4, RC5, RC6 MD2, MD4, MD5, MD6 |
| Notable awards | Turing Award |
Ronald Linn Rivest (born 1947, Schenectady, New York) is a cryptographer. He is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Computer Science at MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a member of the Election Assistance Commission's Technical Guidelines Development Committee, tasked with assisting the EAC in drafting the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines.[1]
Rivest is one of the inventors of the RSA algorithm (along with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman). He is the inventor of the symmetric key encryption algorithms RC2, RC4, RC5, and co-inventor of RC6. The "RC" stands for "Rivest Cipher", or alternatively, "Ron's Code". (RC3 was broken at RSA Security during development; similarly, RC1 was never published.) He also authored the MD2, MD4, MD5 and MD6 cryptographic hash functions. In 2006, he published his invention of the ThreeBallot voting system, an innovative voting system that incorporates the ability for the voter to discern that their vote was counted while still protecting their voter privacy. Most importantly, this system does not rely on cryptography at all. Stating "Our democracy is too important", he simultaneously placed ThreeBallot in the public domain.
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He 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. 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. He is a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in the Theory of Computation Group, and a founder of its Cryptography and Information Security Group. He was also a founder of RSA Data Security (now merged with Security Dynamics to form RSA Security) and of Peppercoin. Professor Rivest has research interests in cryptography, computer and network security, and algorithms.
Rivest is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the International Association for Cryptologic Research, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Together with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman, he has been awarded the 2000 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award and the Secure Computing Lifetime Achievement Award. He also shared with them the Turing Award. Rivest has received an honorary degree (the "laurea honoris causa") from the Sapienza University of Rome.[2] He is a Fellow of the World Technology Network and a Finalist for the 2002 World Technology Award for Communications Technology. In 2005, he received the MITX Lifetime Achievement Award. Rivest was named the 2007 the Marconi Fellow, and on May 29, 2008 he also gave the Chesley lecture at Carleton College.
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