Rivest Receives Marconi Award

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://www.ddj.com/article/printableArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=1PBPAX1IBAEHWQSNDLRSKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=201200121&dept_url=/dept/security/>


Dr. Dobb's |


Rivest Receives Marconi Award

For contributions to cryptography and network security

By Dr. Dobb's Journal
Jul 20, 2007


Ronald L. Rivest, who helped develop one of the world's most widely used
Internet security systems, has been named the 2007 Marconi Fellow and
prize-winner for his pioneering work in the field of cryptography, computer
and network security.

Rivest, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in MIT's Department of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science will receive the award and
accompanying $100,000 prize at the annual Marconi Society Award Dinner in
September.

The Marconi Society, established in 1975 by Gioia Marconi Braga, annually
recognizes a living scientist who, like her father Guglielmo Marconi, the
inventor of radio, shares the determination that advances in communications
and information technology be directed to the social, economic and cultural
improvement of all humanity.

"Ron Rivest's achievements have led to the ability of individuals across
the planet -- in large cities and in remote villages--to conduct and
benefit from secure transactions on the Internet," said Robert Lucky,
chairman of the nonprofit Marconi Society.

The group cited Rivest's advances in public-key cryptography, a technology
that allows users to communicate securely and secretly over an insecure
channel without having to agree upon a shared secret key beforehand.

"Public key cryptography has flattened the globe by enabling secure
communication via e-mail, web browsers, secure shells, virtual private
networks, mobile phones and other applications requiring the secure
exchange of information," Lucky said.

A native of Niskayuna, N.Y., Rivest attended Yale University, where he
earned a B.S. in mathematics in 1969. After receiving his Ph.D. in computer
science from Stanford in 1974, Rivest accepted an offer to join the faculty
at MIT.

At MIT he met two colleagues, Leonard Adleman and Adi Shamir, who would
become his partners in solving the puzzle of public-key cryptography.

"Ron is a very special person," said Adleman. "He has a Renaissance
quality. If tomorrow he discovered an interest in rocketry, then in five
years he would be one of the top rocket scientists in the world."

Fortunately, what captured Rivest's imagination was the challenge of a
public key encryption system. He managed to enlist Adleman and Shamir in
his quest to produce what he called an "e-crypto system." It was a
challenge ideally suited to Rivest's mathematical interests, relying on
what Adleman calls "some of the oldest and deepest mathematics, going back
to antiquity."

In public key cryptography, there are two keys; one known to everyone, and
one known only to the recipient. The public and private keys are paired in
such a way that only the public key can be used to encrypt messages and
only the corresponding private key can be used to decrypt them. But even if
someone knows the public key, it is effectively impossible to deduce the
private key. To design such a system was the challenge. In effect, it was a
mathematical puzzle.

The RSA encryption algorithm that Rivest, Shamir and Adleman developed
relies on the challenge of factoring large prime numbers (typically 250 or
more digits long), a problem that has stumped the world's most prominent
mathematicians and computer scientists for centuries.

At one end of the "conversation," the receiving party's computer secretly
selects two prime numbers and multiplies them to create a "public key"
which can be posted on the Internet. On the other end, the sending party's
computer can take that key, enter it into the RSA algorithm and encrypt a
message.

The genius of the scheme is that only the recipient knows the prime factors
that went into the creation of the public key--and that is what is required
by the RSA algorithm to decipher the message. Even though others can see
the encrypted message and the public key, they cannot decipher the message
because it is impossible to factor the number being used in the public key
within a reasonable period of time.

The team developed its system in 1977 and founded RSA Data Security in
1983. RSA was acquired in 1996 by Security Dynamics, which in turn was
acquired by EMC in 2006. Rivest has continued his work in encryption and is
the inventor of the symmetric key encryption algorithms RC2, RC4, RC5, and
co-inventor of RC6.

Rivest is also a recipient of the Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award.

-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'