Ronald Rivest is best known for his work in cryptography (the RSA public key encryption system) and his co-founding of the RSA Data Security Group.
Ronald Linn Rivest was born in Schenectady, New York, in 1947. After growing up in the area Rivest started his university career at Yale. Rivest received a B.A. in mathematics in 1969, and in 1974 he received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, the latter in computer science. In 1974 Rivest was taken on at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an assistant professor in the electronic engineering and computer science department. In 1976, while working with Adi Shamir, the pair came up with a system of encrypting data. To test the system they brought in Leonard Adleman. On Adleman's 43rd attempt to crack the code they realized they had found a system with the desired level of security. The algorithm was patented and the system, which relied on prime numbers and one-way functions (mathematical formulae that are easy to compute but almost impossible to reverse), was released. The three pioneers founded RSA Data Security Incorporated to market their product. This company was subsequently bought by Security Dynamics and the new company was called RSA Security. Eventually the patent was transferred to MIT to administer. In 1977 Rivest was promoted at MIT, becoming an associate professor--a position he was to retain until 1983. In 1981 Rivest was given the extra responsibility of being the associate director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. In 1983 Rivest was made the Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Rivest was also the head of the Theory of Computation Group and the Cryptography and Information Security Group. As well as his interest in cryptography, Rivest is also interested in all aspects of computer and network security as well as algorithms and machine learning and inductive inference. Rivest has spent time as the director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (the organizing body for the Eurocrypt and Crypto conferences) and as a director of the Financial Cryptography Association.
Rivest has been granted a number of awards (including several for best paper) and he is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2000, with the other members of the RSA Group, Rivest was awarded the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award and the Secure Computing Lifetime Achievement Award. Rivest has written or edited three books and over 100 scientific papers, and he holds three patents, all of which are concerned with cryptography.
Recent Updates
April 20, 2004: Rivest was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Election to the academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be given to a American scientist or engineer. Source: The National Academies, www.nationalacademies.org, May 19, 2004.
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