Matt Franklin
American cryptographer who, with Dan Boneh, made identity-based encryption practical in 2001.
The idea was seventeen years old. In 1984 Adi Shamir proposed that an email address could itself serve as a public key, so nobody had to fetch a certificate before encrypting. Shamir solved signatures but not encryption. At Crypto 2001 Franklin and Dan Boneh showed how bilinear pairings on elliptic curves (the Weil pairing) deliver exactly that: the Boneh–Franklin scheme.
The paper effectively launched pairing-based cryptography as a field of its own. In 2013 Franklin shared the Gödel Prize with Boneh and Antoine Joux, whose one-round tripartite Diffie–Hellman from 2000 had pointed the same way. Franklin has been a professor at UC Davis, working on secret sharing and secure multiparty computation among other things.