Adi Shamir is best known for his work in cryptography, specifically the construction of the RSA public-key encryption system and the subsequent co founding of the RSA Group. Subsequent to this work Shamir has also produced a number of cryptographically important advances.
Adi Shamir was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1952. After schooling in the local area he went to university at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovoth, Israel, where he studied mathematics. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1977. Upon completion of his studies Shamir moved to the United States and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he worked in the Laboratory of Computer Science as an instructor. Here Shamir met Ronald L. Rivest and found one of his new tasks was to teach an advanced algorithm course--an area of which he only had a basic knowledge. Shamir obtained all of the library books on algorithms and quickly brought himself up to speed on the subject. Shamir's new-found knowledge fit in well with the work of Rivest and together they developed an algorithm for public-key cryptography (the ability of two people who had never met to communicate via computers in a secure manner), based on the work of Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. The pair brought in a third researcher, Leonard Adleman, to test the system they had devised. Some of the initial systems they developed proved very easy to solve but on their 43rd attempt they found they had a level of encryption that was felt to be sufficient by all members of the group. The system, based on prime numbers and one-way functions (mathematical formulae that are simple to compute but almost impossible to reverse), was patented and the California-based RSA Data Security Incorporated was formed to look after the system. Eventually the patent was transferred to MIT (where all three were working at the time of development) and the company was taken over by Security Dynamics and the new company was called RSA Security.
In 1980 Shamir moved back to Israel to work at the Weizmann Institute of Science and in 1981 he was made the Paul and Marlene Borman Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. During his time at the Weizmann Institute Shamir has been responsible for the Fiat Shamir identification scheme and many other cryptographic systems, including a visual cryptosystem, zero-knowledge proofs (a system where proof is given that the key is held without the key being given over), secret dispersion, and differential cryptanalysis. At the end of the twentieth century Shamir announced TWINKLE (The Weizmann Institute Key Locating Engine). TWINKLE is an electro-optical device that will execute sieve-based factoring algorithms several times faster than a personal computer can achieve. The practical use of this system is that it could be utilized to break computer generated codes that have previously been regarded as secure, such as those used by financial and government systems. As of 2001 this idea has not been made reality.
In 2000, with the other members of the RSA Group, Shamir was awarded the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award and the Secure Computing Lifetime Achievement Award. Shamir also won the Kennedy prize in 1975 (the Weizmann University award for best Ph.D.) and the IEEE W. R. G. Baker prize in 1986--this was a solo award for Shamir for a paper entitled A Polynomial-Time Algorithm for Breaking the Basic Merkle-Hellman Cryptosystem. Adi Shamir has nearly 100 publications to his name.
During the development of the RSA key one or two unexpected problems were encountered--in 1977 Scientific American published a message encoded using the key and offered a $100 reward to anyone who could crack the code. As part of the competition readers were invited to write to the original authors for a copy of the scientific paper; all three then sent out thousands of copies of the paper. Unfortunately when the National Security Agency (NSA) heard about this the leadership saw serious implications for national security in the unlimited and partially overseas distribution of such a powerful method of encryption (the NSA's consternation was compounded by the fact that Shamir was not an American citizen). The NSA attempted to ban the exporting of encryption technology, but the distribution of this information was eventually allowed--due to the fact it had already been published and distributed so any further action would merely serve to publicize it's existence, and those who wanted to use it for nefarious purposes would have already seen it. Problems with official concerns over national security have shadowed much of Shamir's work.
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