Distinguished Speaker Lecture Series: The Growth of Cryptography

Abstract

Professor Rivest is the Viterbi Professor of Computer Science in MIT's Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a member of the lab's Theory of Computation Group and is a leader of its Cryptography and Information Security Group. His current research interests are in cryptography, computer and network security, voting systems, and algorithms. In the past he has also worked extensively in the area of machine learning. He is a co-author (with Professors Cormen, Leiserson, and Stein) of the well- known text Introduction to Algorithms, published by MIT Press. Over 500,000 copies of this text have been sold. It has been translated into 12 languages.

Professor Rivest is an inventor of the RSA public-key cryptosystem. He has extensive experience in cryptographic design and cryptanalysis, and has published numerous papers in these areas. He has served as a Director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, the organizing body for the Eurocrypt and Crypto conferences, and as a Director of the Financial Cryptography Association. He is a founder of RSA Data Security. (RSA was bought by Security Dynamics; the combined company was renamed to RSA Security, and later purchased by EMC), and is also a co-founder of Verisign and of Peppercoin. He is a member of the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project. He has served on the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), advisory to the Election Assistance Commission, developing recommendations for voting system certification standards; he was chair of the TGDC's Computer Security and Transparence Subcommittee. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Verified Voting Foundation. He is a member of a Scantegrity team developing and testing voting systems that are verifiable "end-to-end."

Reception to follow in Burden Lounge