Adi Shamir

Adi Shamir is an Israeli cryptographer and computer scientist who has been on the faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science Mathematics and Computer Science departments since 1980, earning his PhD in computer science there in 1977 under Zohar Manna after conducting postdoctoral research at MIT. Shamir is best known as one of the three inventors of the RSA public-key encryption algorithm, developed with Ronald Rivest and Leonard Adleman, and he separately created Shamir secret sharing scheme, a method for dividing a secret into pieces so that only a specified minimum number of pieces can reconstruct it. He also pioneered differential cryptanalysis, a general technique for analyzing the security of block ciphers, and co-developed the Feige-Fiat-Shamir identification scheme and the related Fiat-Shamir heuristic for building digital signatures from identification protocols. Shamir shared the ACM Turing Award in 2002 with Rivest and Adleman for the invention of the RSA cryptosystem, and he received the Israel Prize in 2008 and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2024.