Phillip Rogaway
The designer of OCB and XEX who reminded his colleagues in 2015 that cryptography is political.
Phillip Rogaway, long a professor at UC Davis, co-wrote the foundational papers on random oracles and OAEP with Mihir Bellare. On his own he designed the authenticated-encryption mode OCB – faster than anything it competed with, yet held back for two decades by his own patents – and XEX, which underpins the XTS disk-encryption mode.
In 2015 he gave the talk The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work at Asiacrypt, arguing that after the Snowden revelations the field had retreated into harmless theory while mass surveillance was being built out around it. The essay is a rare case of a cryptographer reviewing his own profession, and it is cited enthusiastically by those who agree with it.