Safrira Goldwasser

Co-inventor of zero-knowledge proofs, Goldwasser's research areas include computational complexity theory, cryptography, and computational number theory. Zero-knowledge proofs probabilistically and interactively demonstrate the validity of an assertion without conveying any additional knowledge, and are a key tool in the design of cryptographic protocols.

Her work in complexity theory included the classification of approximation problems, showing that some problems in NP remain hard even when only an approximate solution is needed.