Ron Rivest
More info
- Born
- Known for
- RSA, MD5, RC4, Introduction to Algorithms
- Award
- Turing Award 2002
- Nationality
- American
The R in RSA and the R in CLRS — also the author of MD5, which he now advises against using.
American cryptographer and professor at MIT. In 1977, together with Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, he built RSA, the first practical public-key system. The division of labour was simple: Rivest proposed candidates, the other two tried to break them, and the work was done when one of them held.
He designed the hash functions MD2, MD4 and MD5 and the RC2–RC6 cipher family, co-wrote one of computer science's most widely used textbooks (Introduction to Algorithms, 1990), and has spent the last two decades mostly on election security. Turing Award 2002.