Ronald Rivest

Ronald Linn Rivest is an American cryptographer and computer scientist, an Institute Professor at MIT, who earned his PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1974 under Robert W. Floyd, and who is best known as one of the three inventors of the RSA public-key encryption algorithm, developed together with Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. Rivest designed the MD2, MD4, MD5 and MD6 cryptographic hash functions and the RC2, RC4, RC5 and RC6 symmetric-key encryption algorithms, and he co-authored the widely used algorithms textbook Introduction to Algorithms, first published in 1990 and known by the initials of its four authors. He also worked on election security, inventing the ThreeBallot voting system in 2006 and contributing to the Scantegrity system for verifiable optical-scan voting. Rivest shared the ACM Turing Award in 2002 with Shamir and Adleman for their contribution to the invention of the RSA cryptosystem, and he received the Marconi Prize in 2007.