Famous Cryptographers

David Lee Chaum, born in 1955, is an American computer scientist and cryptographer. He pioneered cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies. Chaum is widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash. His 1982 dissertation, "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups," proposed the first known blockchain protocol. This dissertation included the code to implement the protocol. Chaum's work detailed all but one element of the blockchain later found in the Bitcoin whitepaper. He also developed ecash, an electronic cash application.

Leon Battista Alberti was an Italian humanist, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, and cryptographer. He epitomized the Renaissance Man. James Beck observed that focusing on only one of Leon Battista's fields does not help characterize his extensive explorations in the fine arts. Alberti’s life is documented in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.

David A. Wagner (born 1974) is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He researches cryptography and computer security. Wagner served on the Election Assistance Commission's Technical Guidelines Development Committee to assist the EAC in drafting the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines. He was also a member of the ACCURATE project. Wagner earned his A.B. in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1995, an M.S. in Computer Science from Berkeley in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Berkeley in 2000.

Dan Boneh is a professor of applied cryptography and computer security at Stanford University.

Adi Shamir (Hebrew: עדי שמיר; born July 6, 1952) is an Israeli cryptographer. He co-invented the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman. He also co-invented the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme with Uriel Feige and Amos Fiat. Shamir is one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and made many contributions to cryptography and computer science.

Leonard Adleman (born December 31, 1945) is an American computer scientist. He created the RSA encryption algorithm. For this work, he received the 2002 Turing Award, often called the Nobel prize of Computer Science. Adleman also developed the field of DNA computing.

Michael Oser Rabin (Hebrew: מִיכָאֵל עוזר רַבִּין; September 1, 1931 – April 14, 2026) was a computer scientist. He co-received the 1976 ACM Turing Award with Dana Scott for their work on computational complexity.

Daniel Julius Bernstein (djb; born October 29, 1971) is a German-American mathematician, cryptologist, and programmer. He holds the position of Personal professor ("Persoonlijk hoogleraar") in mathematics and computer science at the Eindhoven University of Technology. He is also a Research Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Eugene Walter was an actor and writer. He appeared in "Beati i Ricchi" and "Ancora una Volta Prima di Lasciarci."

Bruce Schneier (born January 15, 1963) is an American cryptographer, security professional, privacy specialist, and writer. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and a program fellow at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute. He worked for IBM after the acquisition of Resilient Systems, where he was CTO until June 2019. Schneier authored several books on security and cryptography. He also writes for The Guardian.

Martin Edward Hellman (born October 2, 1945) is an American cryptologist. He invented public key cryptography with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle. Hellman contributed to the computer privacy debate and applied risk analysis to nuclear deterrence failure. In 2016, he published a book with his wife, Dorothie Hellman, linking home love to planetary peace (A New Map for Relationships: Creating True Love at Home and Peace on the Planet).

Ronald Linn Rivest (born May 6, 1947) is a cryptographer and an Institute Professor at MIT. Rivest belongs to MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He served on the Election Assistance Commission's Technical Guidelines Development Committee. This committee helped assist the EAC in drafting the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines. Rivest co-invented the RSA algorithm with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman. He invented the symmetric key encryption algorithm.

Carlisle M. Adams is a Canadian cryptographer and computer security researcher. He was a senior cryptographer at Entrust and currently serves as a professor at the University of Ottawa. Adams designed the block ciphers CAST-128 and CAST-256 with Stafford Tavares. These ciphers use S-boxes based on bent function properties. He also organized the first Selected Areas in Cryptography (SAC) workshop in 1994 and advises Signority, an electronic signature company based in Ottawa.

Gilles Brassard is a faculty member at the Université de Montréal. He has been a Full Professor since 1988 and a Canada Research Chair since 2001.

Taher Elgamal (Arabic: طاهر الجمل) was an Egyptian cryptographer, born August 18, 1955. In 1985, Elgamal published "A Public key Cryptosystem and A Signature Scheme based on discrete Logarithms." This paper proposed the design for the ElGamal discrete log cryptosystem and the ElGamal signature scheme. The signature scheme became the basis for the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA), which the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) adopted as the Digital Signature Standard (DSS). Elgamal also participated in the "SET" credit card payment protocol and various Internet payment schemes.

Silvio Micali was born October 13, 1954. He is an Italian computer scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Since 1983, he has been a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. His research focuses on cryptography and information security. Silvio Micali won the Turing Award in 2012 with Shafi Goldwasser. His interests include cryptography, zero knowledge, pseudorandom generation, and security.

Shafrira "Shafi" Goldwasser (Hebrew: שפרירה גולדווסר‎) is an American-Israeli computer scientist. She won the Turing Award in 2012. Shafi Goldwasser is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She is also a professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. She co-founded Duality Technologies and directed the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in Berkeley, CA.

Horst Feistel (January 30, 1915 – November 14, 1990) was a German-born cryptographer. He worked on cipher design at IBM. His research led to the development of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) in the 1970s. The structure used in DES is called a Feistel Network. This network is used in many block ciphers.

Rafail Ostrovsky is a professor of computer science and mathematics at UCLA. He is a well-known researcher in algorithms and cryptography.

Oded Goldreich (Hebrew: עודד גולדרייך‎; b. 1957) is a professor of Computer Science at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. His research covers the theory of computation. He studies the interplay of randomness and computation, the foundations of cryptography, and computational complexity theory. Goldreich won the Knuth Prize in 2017. He contributed to pseudorandomness, zero knowledge proofs, secure function evaluation, property testing, and other areas of cryptography and computational complexity.

Victor Saul Miller was born on March 3, 1947, in Brooklyn, New York. He is an American mathematician who worked at the Center for Communications Research (CCR) of the Institute for Defense Analyses in Princeton, New Jersey, U.S. Miller earned his A.B. in mathematics from Columbia University in 1968 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1975. He served as an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1973 to 1978. In 1978, he joined the IBM 801 project in the Computer Science Department at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

Ian Avrum Goldberg was born on March 31, 1973. He is a cryptographer and cypherpunk. Goldberg broke Netscape's implementation of SSL with David Wagner. He served as the chief scientist for Radialpoint (formerly Zero Knowledge Systems), a Canadian software company. Currently, Goldberg is a professor at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. He was formerly the chairman of the Tor Project board of directors and designed off-the-record messaging.

Claude Crépeau was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1962. He holds a professor position in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. Crépeau earned his master's degree from the Université de Montréal in 1986. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 1990. During his studies, he worked in cryptography with Prof. Silvio Micali as his Ph.D. advisor and Gilles Brassard as his M.Sc advisor. Crépeau spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Université d'Orsay. He was also a CNRS researcher at École Normale Supérieure from 1992 to 1995. He became an associate professor at Université de Montréal in 1991.

Gregg Palmer is an American actor. He appeared in "Taza, Son of Cochise," "Shenandoah," and "Magnificent Obsession."

Neal I. Koblitz was born on December 24, 1948. He is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. Koblitz created hyperelliptic curve cryptography and independently co-created elliptic curve cryptography.

Don Coppersmith was born around 1950. He worked on designing the Data Encryption Standard block cipher at IBM, focusing on S-boxes to strengthen them against differential cryptanalysis. Coppersmith discovered the quantum Fourier transform. He also developed algorithms for computing discrete logarithms and analyzed RSA cryptanalysis. Coppersmith created methods for rapid matrix multiplication (Coppersmith–Winograd algorithm) and IBM's MARS cipher. Don co-designed the SEAL and Scream ciphers. In 1972, Coppersmith obtained a bachelor's degree.

Ralph C. Merkle was born on February 2, 1952. He is a computer scientist. Merkle invented public key cryptography and cryptographic hashing. Recently, he has worked as a researcher and speaker on cryonics.

Malcolm John Williamson was a British mathematician and cryptographer. In 1974, he developed the Diffie–Hellman key exchange. He worked at GCHQ but could not publicize his research because it was classified. Martin Hellman independently developed the key exchange. The British government declassified Williamson's research in 1997. Williamson studied at Manchester Grammar School and won first prize in the 1968 British Mathematical Olympiad. He also won a Silver prize at the 1967 Internat.

Bailey Whitfield 'Whit' Diffie (born June 5, 1944), ForMemRS, is an American cryptographer. He pioneered public-key cryptography alongside Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle. Their 1976 paper, "New Directions in Cryptography," introduced a new method for distributing cryptographic keys. This technique solved the fundamental problem of key distribution. It became known as the Diffie–Hellman key exchange. The article stimulated immediate public development of asymmetric key algorithms.

Leopold Samuel "Leo" Marks, MBE (September 24, 1920 – January 15, 2001), was an English writer, screenwriter, and cryptographer. During the Second World War, Marks headed the codes office supporting resistance agents in occupied Europe for the Special Operations Executive organization. After the war, Marks became a playwright and screenwriter. He wrote scripts using his war-time cryptographic experiences. He wrote the script for *Peeping Tom*, a controversial film directed by Michael Powell. The film affected Powell's career but Martin Sc...

Eli Biham (Hebrew: אלי ביהם‎) is an Israeli cryptographer and cryptanalyst. He is currently a professor in the Computer Science department at the Technion Israeli Institute of Technology. From October 2008 to 2013, Biham served as the dean of the Technion Computer Science department. He also served two years as chief of the CS graduate school. Biham received his Ph.D. for inventing differential cryptanalysis while working under Adi Shamir. The method was invented at least twice before. An IBM team discovered it during work on DES and was required to keep it.

Lars Ramkilde Knudsen (born February 21, 1962) is a Danish researcher in cryptography. He focuses on the design and analysis of block ciphers, hash functions, and message authentication codes (MACs).

Ross John Anderson, FRS, FREng (born September 15, 1956), is a researcher, author, and industry consultant in security engineering. He is a Professor of Security Engineering at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, where he is part of the University's security group.

Charles Pickering Bowditch was an American financier, archaeologist, cryptographer, and linguistics scholar specializing in Mayan epigraphy. He was born in Boston into the Massachusetts Bowditch family. His grandfather was mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch and physiologist Henry Pickering Bowditch. His brother was the son of Jonathan Ingersoll Bowditch and Lucy Orme Nichols. Bowditch received his undergraduate degree in 1863 and his master's degree in 1866 from Harvard University. During the American Civil War, he served as an officer in the 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a colored regiment.

Bart Preneel was born on October 15, 1963. He is a Flemish cryptographer and cryptanalyst. He teaches at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven within the COSIC group. Preneel served as president of the International Association for Cryptologic Research from 2008 to 2013 and managed the ECRYPT project. Along with Shoji Miyaguchi, he invented the Miyaguchi–Preneel scheme, a structure used in hash functions like Whirlpool. He authored the RIPEMD-160 hash function. Preneel also co-invented the stream cipher MUGI, which became a Japanese standard, and the stream cipher T.

Gustavus J. Simmons was born in 1930. He is a retired cryptographer and former manager of the applied mathematics Department and Senior Fellow at Sandia National Laboratories. Simmons focused on authentication theory. He developed cryptographic techniques to solve problems involving mutual distrust and devised protocols where functions could be trusted despite uncertain inputs or participants. Simmons was born in West Virginia. He was named after his grandfather, a prohibition officer who died three years before Gustavus was born.

Paul Carl Kocher was born on June 11, 1973. He is an American cryptographer and entrepreneur. Kocher founded Cryptography Research, Inc. He served as its president and chief scientist.

Vincent Rijmen (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈrɛi̯mə(n)]) was born on October 16, 1970. He is a Belgian cryptographer and one of the two designers of the Rijndael, the Advanced Encryption Standard. Rijmen co-designed the WHIRLPOOL cryptographic hash function and the block ciphers Anubis, KHAZAD, Square, NOEKEON, and SHARK. In 1993, Rijmen earned a degree in electronics engineering from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He studied as a PhD student at the ESAT/COSIC lab of the K.U.Leuven. Rijmen completed his doctoral dissertation in 1997, titled Cryptanalysis and design of iterated block ciphers.

Wang Xiaoyun (pinyin: Wáng Xiǎoyún; born 1966) is a Chinese cryptographer and computer scientist. She is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and System Science at Shandong University and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. At the CRYPTO 2004 rump session, she and co-authors demonstrated collision attacks against MD5, SHA-0, and other hash functions. This involves two distinct messages resulting in the same hash output. They received a standing ovation for their work.

Charles Weill Rackoff is an American cryptologist. Born in New York City, he attended MIT as an undergraduate and graduate student. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1974. Rackoff spent one year as a postdoctoral scholar at INRIA in France. He currently works at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on computational complexity theory. He specialized in cryptography and security protocols. In 1988, he collaborated with Michael Luby on an analysis of the Feistel cipher construction.

James Henry Ellis lived from September 25, 1924, to November 25, 1997. He was a British engineer and cryptographer. While working at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham in 1970, he conceived of non-secret encryption, which became known as public-key cryptography.

Paulo S. L. M. Barreto was born in 1965 and is a Brazilian cryptographer. He designed the Whirlpool hash function and the block ciphers Anubis and KHAZAD, working with Vincent Rijmen. Barreto co-authored research on elliptic curve cryptography and pairing-based cryptography. This work includes the eta pairing technique, identity-based cryptographic protocols, and the family of Barreto-Naehrig (BN) pairing-friendly elliptic curves. He recently focused his research on post-quantum cryptography, discovering quasi-dyadic codes and quasi-cyclic codes.

Joan Daemen (born 1965) is a Belgian cryptographer. She co-designed the Rijndael cipher with Vincent Rijmen, which became the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in 2001. She also co-designed the Keccak cryptographic hash, selected by NIST as SHA-3 in October 2012. Daemen designed or co-designed several block ciphers, including MMB, Square, SHARK, NOEKEON, 3-Way, and BaseKing. In 2017, she won the Levchin Prize for Real World Cryptography for developing AES and SHA3. She graduated in electro-mechanical engineering in 1988.

Eric Bertrand Ceadel was a philologist and cryptographer. He was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, from 1962 to 1979. He served as Reader in Japanese and Librarian of the Cambridge University Library from 1967 until his death.

Phillip Rogaway teaches computer science at the University of California, Davis. He earned a BA in computer science from UC Berkeley and a PhD in cryptography from MIT's Theory of Computation group. Rogaway has taught at UC Davis since 1994. In 2009, he received the Paris Kanellakis Award and the first Levchin Prize for Real World Cryptography in 2016. Rogaway also received an NSF CAREER award in 1996. The NSA attempted to prevent this by influencing the NSF. Media outlets have interviewed him about his views on ethical obligations.

Rolf Noskwith (19 June 1919 – 3 January 2017) was a British businessman. During the Second World War, he worked as a cryptographer for Alan Turing at Bletchley Park.

Scott A. Vanstone was a mathematician and cryptographer at the University of Waterloo Faculty of Mathematics. He joined the school's Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research and founded the cybersecurity company Certicom. Vanstone received his PhD in 1974. For about ten years, he focused on combinatorial design theory, finite geometry, and finite fields. He began working in cryptography during the 1980s. Vanstone developed an improved algorithm for computing discrete logarithms with Ian Blake, R. Fuji-Hara, and Ron Mullin.

Mihir Bellare is a cryptographer and professor at the University of California San Diego. He published several papers on cryptography, including work on provable security, often co-authored with Phillip Rogaway. Bellare also published papers on Format-Preserving Encryption. His students include Michel Abdalla, Chanathip Namprempre, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Anton Mityagin. Bellare is one of the authors of *skein*. In 2003, Bellare received RSA's Sixth Annual Conference Award for outstanding contributions to mathematics.

Clifford Christopher Cocks CB FRS (born 28 December 1950) was a British mathematician and cryptographer. In 1973, while working at the United Kingdom Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), he invented a public key cryptography algorithm equivalent to RSA (1978). This idea was classified and hidden for 24 years. Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman independently invented the concept in 1977. Public-key cryptography using prime factorization is now used in nearly every Internet transaction.

Alfred Menezes is a professor of mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada. He co-authored several books on cryptography, including the *Handbook of Applied Cryptography*.