Ron Rivest


Ronald Linn Rivest is a cryptographer and an Institute Professor at MIT. He is a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity.
Rivest is one of the inventors of the RSA algorithm. 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". He also authored the MD2, MD4, MD5 and MD6 cryptographic hash functions.

Education

Rivest 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 for research supervised by Robert W. Floyd.

Career and research

At MIT Rivest is a member of the Theory of Computation Group, and founder of MIT CSAIL's Cryptography and Information Security Group.
He is a co-author of Introduction to Algorithms, a standard textbook on algorithms, with Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson and Clifford Stein. Other contributions to the field of algorithms include the paper, "Time Bounds for Selection", which gives a worst-case linear-time algorithm for finding the median of a given set of numbers.
In 2006, he published his invention of the ThreeBallot voting system, a 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. He was a member of the Election Assistance Commission's Technical Guidelines Development Committee, tasked with assisting the EAC in drafting the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines.
Rivest frequently collaborates with other researchers in combinatorics, for example working with David A. Klarner to find an upper bound on the number of polyominoes of a given order and working with Jean Vuillemin to prove the deterministic form of the Aanderaa–Rosenberg conjecture.
He was also a founder of RSA Data Security, Verisign, and of Peppercoin. Rivest has research interests in algorithms, cryptography and voting. His former doctoral students include Avrim Blum, Burt Kaliski, Anna Lysyanskaya, Ron Pinter, Robert Schapire, Alan Sherman,
and Mona Singh.

Publications

His publications include:
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 from the Sapienza University of Rome. In 2005, he received the MITX Lifetime Achievement Award. Rivest was named in 2007 the Marconi Fellow, and on May 29, 2008 he also gave the Chesley lecture at Carleton College. He was named an Institute Professor at MIT in June 2015.