The Genius of Shafrira Goldwasser
The Genius of Shafrira Goldwasser
We must tip our hat to the great minds of the 1980s and 1990s who build a strong foundation of security, including Ron Rivest, Ralph Merkle, Adi Shamir and Whitfield Diffie. But there are many others who had a long-term commitment to areas of privacy and public key encryption. This includes Shafrira “Shafi” Goldwasser. Over her career Shafrira was awarded many prizes, including, in 2012, the Turing Award, and, in 2019, an Honorary Doctorate of Science by the University of Oxford.
Shafi was born in 1958, and obtained her degree in 1979 (Carnegie Mellon University) and then was awarded a PhD in 1984 (from the University of California) [here]:
She is currently the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT [here]. Her PhD supervisor was the mighty Manuel Blum, of which she wrote several classic papers with:
Overall she was a co-inventor of zero-knowledge proofs and probabilistic encryption. She now has a key focus on blockchain, and now is a scientific advisor to Algorand [here]:
If you are interested, here are two articles on her key contributions:
With public key encryption, Alice could have two possible messages (a ‘0’ or a ‘1’) that she sends to Bob. If Eve knows…medium.com
And a hint of homomorphic encryptionmedium.com
And here she is in action: