About the Speaker

Adi Shamir is an Israeli cryptographer who has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer science.  He was co-inventor of the RSA algorithm, co-inventor of the Feige-Fiat-Shamir identification scheme and one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis.

Shamir obtained a BS degree in Mathematics from Tel Aviv University in 1973 and received MSc and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute in 1975 and 1977 respectively.  He also received an honorary Doctor of Mathematics degree from the University of Waterloo and has been an invited professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris since 2006.  He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Anna and Lajos Erdős Prize in Mathematics in 1983, the ACM Turing Prize in 2002, in recognition of his contributions to cryptography and the Israel Prize for Computer Sciences in 2008.

Turing's Cryptography from a Modern Perspective

70 years ago, Alan Turing changed the course of history by breaking some of the most sophisticated encryption machines used by the German armed forces. Since then, the theory and practice of cryptography underwent enormous changes. In this talk I will demonstrate how Turing's early ideas are still shaping and influencing the field by describing some of the problems he considered and how we are dealing with them today using modern tools and approaches.