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SCS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES
4:00 PM - Wean Hall 7500
3:45 PM Distinguished Donuts - Outside the Hall

Adi Shamir
Professor, Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics
The Weizmann Institute of Science
and Chief Technical Advisor, CYOTA

Cryptography: State of the Science

In this talk I'll present a general (and highly opinionated) overview of cryptographic research over the last 25 years. I'll describe the main themes and achievements, and present the major challenges and open problems in the field. The talk will be self contained, and will not assume any prior knowledge in cryptography.

Speaker Bio:

Prof. Adi Shamir was the 2002 winner of the Association for Computing Machinery A.M. Turing Award, sharing the award with Ronald L. Rivest (MIT) and Leonard M. Adleman (University of Southern California). While working at MIT in 1977, the three scientists developed a method that later became known as the RSA algorithm (the acronym for their last names). Used worldwide to secure Internet, banking and credit card transactions, the RSA algorithm allows for the delivery of encrypted and signed codes and their decryption between parties that have never previously been in contact. The time needed to crack some versions of the method, which is based on the multiplication of two very large prime numbers and the difficulty of determining those prime numbers from their product, is estimated at thousands of years on the fastest computers. Among the numerous applications of this research are smart cards, regularly installed in household television sets to ensure that only subscribers receive TV satellite broadcasts. The smart card also allows the company activating the satellite to charge its customers only for programs viewed by them.

Shamir earned his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees at the Weizmann Institute of Science and went to MIT, where he spent three years, from 1977 to 1980. He then returned to the Weizmann Institute, publishing numerous articles and receiving several prestigious awards, including ACM's Kannelakis Award, the Erdos Prize of the Israel Mathematical Society, the IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize, the UAP Scientific Prize, The Vatican's PUIS XI Gold Medal and the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award.

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