Ari Juels
American cryptographer behind honeywords, proofs of retrievability and one of the earliest proof-of-work proposals.
Juels spent many years as chief scientist at RSA Laboratories before moving to Cornell Tech in New York in 2013. He has a habit of naming ideas that other people later build whole industries on. With John Brainard he proposed client puzzles against denial-of-service attacks in 1999, and the same year he and Markus Jakobsson coined the term proof of work.
With Burt Kaliski he described proofs of retrievability in 2007: how a client can check that a cloud provider still holds its files without downloading them. With Ron Rivest he proposed honeywords in 2013 — decoy password hashes that raise an alarm when a stolen database is put to use.