罗纳德·李维斯特

罗纳德·林·李维斯特 （英语：Ronald Linn Rivest，1947年5月6日—），美国密码学家。他是麻省理工学院电子工程和计算机科学部门（EECS）计算机科学的教授和麻省理工学院之计算机科学和人工智能实验室（CSAIL）的成员。

他与阿迪·萨莫尔和伦纳德·阿德曼共同发明了RSA加密算法；以及在密码学和计算机科学等领域做出许多杰出贡献而知名。RSA被广泛使用在计算机安全应用上，包括HTTPS。2002年，他与阿迪·萨莫尔和伦纳德·阿德曼一起因在公钥密码学RSA加密算法取得的杰出贡献而获得图灵奖。

著作

Cormen, Thomas H.; Leiserson, Charles E.; Rivest, Ronald L. Introduction to Algorithms first edition. MIT Press and McGraw-Hill. 1990. ISBN 0-262-03141-8. 引文格式1维护：冗余文本 (link)

Cormen, Thomas H.; Leiserson, Charles E.; Rivest, Ronald L.; Stein, Clifford. Introduction to Algorithms second edition. MIT Press and McGraw-Hill. 2001. ISBN 0-262-53196-8. 引文格式1维护：冗余文本 (link)

Cormen, Thomas H.; Leiserson, Charles E.; Rivest, Ronald L.; Stein, Clifford. Introduction to Algorithms third edition. MIT Press. 2009. ISBN 0-262-03384-4. 引文格式1维护：冗余文本 (link)

Ronald Linn Rivest ( born May 6, 1947) is an American cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Along with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman, Rivest is one of the inventors of the RSA algorithm, for which they won the 2002 ACM Turing Award. He is also the inventor of the symmetric key encryption algorithms RC2, RC4, and RC5, and co-inventor of RC6. He also devised the MD2, MD4, MD5 and MD6 cryptographic hash functions.

Education

Rivest earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Yale University in 1969, and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Stanford University in 1974 for research supervised by Robert W. Floyd.

Career

At MIT, Rivest is a member of the Theory of Computation Group, and founder of MIT CSAIL's Cryptography and Information Security Group.

Rivest was a founder of RSA Data Security (now merged with Security Dynamics to form RSA Security), Verisign, and of Peppercoin.

His former doctoral students include Avrim Blum, Benny Chor, Sally Goldman, Burt Kaliski, Anna Lysyanskaya, Margrit Betke, Ron Pinter, Robert Schapire, Alan Sherman, and Mona Singh.

Research

Rivest is especially known for his research in cryptography. He has also made significant contributions to algorithm design, to the computational complexity of machine learning, and to election security.

Cryptography

Rivest, jointly with Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, introduced the RSA cryptosystem in 1978,[C1] which revolutionized modern cryptography by providing the first usable and publicly described method for public-key cryptography. Rivest had reportedly thought of the key idea behind the cryptosystem after having drunk large amounts of wine while celebrating Passover with Shamir and Adleman at a student's house. The three won the 2002 Turing Award for "their ingenious contribution to making public-key cryptography useful in practice." The same paper was also the first to introduce Alice and Bob, the fictional heroes of many subsequent cryptographic protocols. In the same year, Rivest, Adleman, and Michael Dertouzos first formulated homomorphic encryption and its applications in secure cloud computing,[C2] an idea that would not come to fruition until over 40 years later when secure homomorphic encryption algorithms were finally developed.

Rivest was one of the inventors of the GMR public signature scheme, published with Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali in 1988,[C3]

and of ring signatures, an anonymized form of group signatures invented with Shamir and Yael Tauman Kalai in 2001.[C7] He designed the MD4 and MD5 cryptographic hash functions, published in 1990 and 1992 respectively,[C4][C5] and a sequence of symmetric key block ciphers that include RC2, RC4, RC5, and RC6.[C6][C8]

Other contributions of Rivest to cryptography include chaffing and winnowing, the interlock protocol for authenticating anonymous key-exchange, cryptographic time capsules such as LCS35 based on anticipated improvements to computation speed through Moore's law, key whitening and its application through the xor–encrypt–xor key mode in extending the Data Encryption Standard to DES-X, and the Peppercoin system for cryptographic micropayments.

Algorithms

In 1973, Rivest and his coauthors published the first selection algorithm that achieved linear time without using randomization.[A1] Their algorithm, the median of medians method, is commonly taught in algorithms courses. Rivest is also one of the two namesakes of the Floyd–Rivest algorithm, a randomized selection algorithm that achieves a near-optimal number of comparisons.[A2]