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Adi Shamir

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Adi Shamir
עדי שמיר
Shamir in 2018
Born (1952-07-06) July 6, 1952 (age 74)
Tel Aviv, Israel
EducationTel Aviv University (BSc)
Weizmann Institute of Science (MSc, PhD)
Known forRSA
Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme
differential cryptanalysis
Shamir's secret sharing
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsCryptography
InstitutionsWeizmann Institute
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thesis The fixedpoints of recursive definitions[2]  (1976)
Zohar Manna[3]
Doctoral students
Eli Biham
Uriel Feige
Amos Fiat[3]
Websitewww.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/profile/scientists/shamir-profile.html

Adi Shamir (Hebrew: עדי שמיר; born July 6, 1952) is an Israeli cryptographer and inventor. He is a co-inventor of the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm (along with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman), a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme (along with Uriel Feige and Amos Fiat), one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer science.[4] In 2002, Ron Rivest, Len Adleman, and Shamir won the ACM Turing Award.[5]

Early life and education

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Adi Shamir was born in Tel Aviv. He received a Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree in mathematics from Tel Aviv University in 1973 and obtained an MSc and PhD in computer science from the Weizmann Institute in 1975 and 1977 respectively.[3] He spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Warwick and did research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1977 to 1980.

Scientific career

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In 1980, he returned to Israel, joining the faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute.[6] Starting from 2006, he is also an invited professor at École Normale Supérieure in Paris.[6]

In addition to RSA, Shamir's other numerous inventions and contributions to cryptography include the Shamir secret sharing scheme, the breaking of the Merkle-Hellman knapsack cryptosystem, visual cryptography, and the TWIRL and TWINKLE factoring devices. Together with Eli Biham, he discovered differential cryptanalysis in the late 1980s, a general method for attacking block ciphers. It later emerged that differential cryptanalysis was already known — and kept a secret — by both IBM[7] and the National Security Agency (NSA).[8]

In 1984, Shamir introduced the concept of identity-based cryptography, in which a user's public key can be derived from a unique identifier such as an email address.[9]

In 1986, together with Amos Fiat, he devised the Fiat–Shamir heuristic, a widely used method for converting interactive identification protocols into digital signature schemes.[10]

Together with Rivest and Adleman, Shamir co-founded RSA Security, the company behind the annual RSA Conference held since 1991.[11][5]

With Alex Biryukov and David Wagner, he presented in 2000 a real-time cryptanalysis of A5/1, the stream cipher used to encrypt GSM mobile phone communications.[12]

In 2001, with Ron Rivest and Yael Tauman, he introduced the concept of ring signatures, which allow a member of a group to sign a message without revealing which member produced the signature.[13][14] The same year, together with Scott Fluhrer and Itsik Mantin, he published a key-recovery attack on the RC4 stream cipher, known as the Fluhrer–Mantin–Shamir attack, which demonstrated a practical weakness in the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol then used to secure Wi-Fi networks.[15]

Shamir has also developed a range of side-channel attacks on cryptographic implementations, including cache attacks and acoustic cryptanalysis; in 2014, together with Daniel Genkin and Eran Tromer, he demonstrated the extraction of full 4096-bit RSA keys from a laptop using the sound it emits during decryption.[16][17]

Since the late 2010s, Shamir has also studied the security of machine learning systems, co-authoring work on the theory of adversarial examples, including the "Dimpled Manifold Model" of how neural network decision boundaries evolve during training,[18] and on cryptanalytic techniques for extracting the parameters of neural network models.[19]

In March 2019, Shamir was unable to attend the RSA Conference in San Francisco, where he traditionally appeared on the Cryptographers' Panel, after his application for a US visa went unanswered for two months; addressing the conference by video, he suggested that the research community reconsider where it holds its scientific conferences.[20][11]

Beyond cryptography, Shamir has made contributions to computer science more broadly, such as finding the first linear time algorithm for 2-satisfiability[21] and proving, building on work of Carsten Lund, Lance Fortnow, Howard Karloff, and Noam Nisan, that the complexity classes PSPACE and IP are equal.[22][23]

Awards and recognition

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See also

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References

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  1. 1 2 Anon (2018). "Adi Shamir ForMemRS". royalsociety.org. London: Royal Society. Retrieved 2018-07-22. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
    "All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." --Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies at the Wayback Machine (archived 2016-11-11)
  2. ↑ Shamir, Adi (October 1976). The fixedpoints of recursive definitions. Weizmann Institute of Science. OCLC 884951223.
  3. 1 2 3 Adi Shamir at the Mathematics Genealogy Project Edit this at Wikidata
  4. ↑ Adi Shamir at DBLP Bibliography Server Edit this at Wikidata
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "A.M. Turing Award Winners by Year". Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved 2026-07-05.
  6. 1 2 "Adi Shamir - A.M. Turing Award Laureate". amturing.acm.org. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  7. ↑ Coppersmith, Don (May 1994). "The Data Encryption Standard (DES) and its strength against attacks" (PDF). IBM Journal of Research and Development. 38 (3): 243–250. doi:10.1147/rd.383.0243. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2007-06-15. (subscription required)
  8. ↑ Levy, Steven (2001). Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government — Saving Privacy in the Digital Age. Penguin Books. pp. 55–56. ISBN 0-14-024432-8.
  9. ↑ Shamir, Adi (1985). "Identity-Based Cryptosystems and Signature Schemes". Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 1984. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 196. Springer. pp. 47–53. doi:10.1007/3-540-39568-7_5. ISBN 978-3-540-15658-1.
  10. ↑ Fiat, Amos; Shamir, Adi (1987). "How To Prove Yourself: Practical Solutions to Identification and Signature Problems". Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO' 86. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 263. Springer. pp. 186–194. doi:10.1007/3-540-47721-7_12. ISBN 978-3-540-18047-0.
  11. 1 2 Thomson, Iain (March 5, 2019). "Adi Shamir visa snub: US govt slammed after the S in RSA blocked from his own RSA conf". The Register. Retrieved July 13, 2026.
  12. ↑ Biryukov, Alex; Shamir, Adi; Wagner, David (2001). "Real Time Cryptanalysis of A5/1 on a PC". Fast Software Encryption – FSE 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 1978. Springer. pp. 1–18. doi:10.1007/3-540-44706-7_1. ISBN 978-3-540-41728-6.
  13. ↑ Rivest, Ronald L.; Shamir, Adi; Tauman, Yael (2001). "How to Leak a Secret". Advances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 2248. Springer. pp. 552–565. doi:10.1007/3-540-45682-1_32. ISBN 978-3-540-42987-6.
  14. 1 2 "Adi Shamir". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved July 13, 2026.
  15. ↑ Fluhrer, Scott; Mantin, Itsik; Shamir, Adi (2001). "Weaknesses in the Key Scheduling Algorithm of RC4". Selected Areas in Cryptography – SAC 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 2259. Springer. pp. 1–24. doi:10.1007/3-540-45537-X_1. ISBN 978-3-540-43066-7.
  16. ↑ "Professor Adi Shamir FRS". Royal Society. Retrieved July 13, 2026.
  17. ↑ Genkin, Daniel; Shamir, Adi; Tromer, Eran (2014). "RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis". Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 8616. Springer. pp. 444–461. doi:10.1007/978-3-662-44371-2_25. ISBN 978-3-662-44370-5.
  18. ↑ Shamir, Adi; Melamed, Odelia; BenShmuel, Oriel (2021). "The Dimpled Manifold Model of Adversarial Examples in Machine Learning". arXiv:2106.10151 [cs.LG].
  19. ↑ Canales-Martínez, Isaac A.; Chávez-Saab, Jorge; Hambitzer, Anna; Rodríguez-Henríquez, Francisco; Satpute, Nitin; Shamir, Adi (2024). "Polynomial Time Cryptanalytic Extraction of Neural Network Models". Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 14653. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-58734-4_1.
  20. ↑ Spring, Tom (March 6, 2019). "RSA Conference 2019: Cryptographers' Panel Decries Adi Shamir's Visa Issues". Threatpost. Retrieved July 13, 2026.
  21. ↑ Even, S.; Itai, A.; Shamir, A. (1976), "On the complexity of time table and multi-commodity flow problems", SIAM Journal on Computing, 5 (4): 691–703, doi:10.1137/0205048.
  22. ↑ Shamir, Adi (October 1992). "IP = PSPACE". Journal of the ACM. 39 (4): 869–877. doi:10.1145/146585.146609.
  23. ↑ Shen, Alexander (October 1992). "IP = PSPACE: Simplified Proof". Journal of the ACM. 39 (4): 878–880. doi:10.1145/146585.146613.
  24. ↑ "Erdős Prize". Israel Mathematical Union. Retrieved July 13, 2026.
  25. ↑ "IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Paper Award Recipients" (PDF). IEEE. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-04-25. Retrieved February 5, 2011.
  26. ↑ "Pius XI Medal". www.pas.va. Archived from the original on 2014-12-31. Retrieved 2019-02-21.
  27. ↑ "ACM Award Citation / Adi Shamir". Archived from the original on 2009-04-06. Retrieved 2009-02-17.
  28. ↑ "IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award Recipients" (PDF). IEEE. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-11-24. Retrieved February 15, 2011.
  29. ↑ "Israel Prize Official Site (in Hebrew) - Recipient's C.V." Archived from the original on 2012-09-10.
  30. ↑ "Israel Prize Official Site (in Hebrew) - Judges' Rationale for Grant to Recipient". Archived from the original on 2012-09-10.
  31. ↑ "Presentation of the honorary degree at the Fall 2009 Convcation" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-09-24. Retrieved October 31, 2011.
  32. ↑ "Laureates of the Japan Prize". Archived from the original on 2017-02-04.
  33. ↑ "APS Announces 2019 Class of New Members". American Philosophical Society. May 2019. Retrieved July 13, 2026.
  34. ↑ "Prof. Adi Shamir". Weizmann Institute of Science. Retrieved July 13, 2026.
  35. ↑ "The Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography". rwc.iacr.org. Retrieved 2025-03-26.
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