Eli Biham
| Eli Biham | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Native name | אלי ביהם |
| Nationality | Israel |
| Fields | Mathematics and Computer science |
| Institutions | Technion |
| Alma mater |
Tel Aviv University, Weizmann Institute |
| Doctoral advisor | Adi Shamir |
| Known for | Studies in cryptography and cryptanalysis (invention and breaking of Encryption functions), specifically Differential cryptanalysis |
Eli Biham (Hebrew: אלי ביהם) is an Israeli cryptographer and cryptanalyst, currently a professor at the Technion Israeli Institute of Technology Computer Science department. Starting from October 2008, Biham is the dean of the Technion Computer Science department, after serving for two years as chief of CS graduate school. Biham received his Ph.D. for inventing (publicly) differential cryptanalysis, while working under Adi Shamir. It had, it turned out, been invented at least twice before. A team at IBM discovered it during their work on DES, and was requested/required to keep their discovery secret by the NSA, who evidently knew about it as well.
Contributions to cryptanalysis
Among his many contributions to cryptanalysis one can count:
- differential cryptanalysis - publicly invented during his Ph.D. studies under Adi Shamir
- Attacking all triple modes of operation.
- impossible differential cryptanalysis - joint work with Adi Shamir and Alex Biryukov
- Breaking (together with Lars Knudsen) the ANSI X9.52 CBCM mode (few days before the final standardization)
- Breaking the GSM security mechanisms (with Elad Barkan and Nathan Keller)
- Co-invention of related-key attacks.
- Differential Fault Analysis - joint work with Adi Shamir
New cryptographic primitives
Biham has taken part in the design of several new cryptographic primitives:
- Serpent (with Ross Anderson and Lars Knudsen), a block cipher which was one of the final five contenders to become the Advanced Encryption Standard
- Tiger (with Ross Anderson), a hash function fast on 64-bit machines, and
- Py (with Jennifer Seberry), one of a family of fast stream ciphers (see article for more detail on their cryptanalytic status).
- SHAvite-3 (with Orr Dunkelman), a hash function which was one of the 14 semifinalists in the NIST hash function competition.