Silvio Micali

Co-inventor of zero-knowledge proofs, Micali is an Italian-born computer scientist known for fundamental contributions to cryptography and information security. He has served as a Professor of Computer Science in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science since 1983, working at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He graduated in Mathematics at La Sapienza University of Rome in 1978 and earned a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982 — his PhD thesis adviser was Manuel Blum.

He won the Gödel Prize in 1993. In 2007, Micali was selected to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the IACR. He has also been a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Turing Award for the year 2012 along with Shafi Goldwasser for their work in the field of cryptography.

Micali is best known for some of his fundamental early work on public-key cryptosystems, pseudorandom functions, digital signatures, oblivious transfer, secure multiparty computation, and is one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs — a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that a given statement is true, without conveying any additional information apart from the fact that the statement is indeed true.

Among the publications which he authored or co-authored are: with Michael J. Fischer and Charles Rackoff, "A Secure Protocol for the Oblivious Transfer" (Extended Abstract), Journal of Cryptology, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 191–195, 1996; with Oded Goldreich and Avi Wigderson, "Proofs that Yield Nothing But Their Validity, or All Languages in NP have Zero-Knowledge Proof Systems," Journal of the ACM, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 691–729, 1991; and with Manuel Blum, "How to Generate Cryptographically Strong Sequences of Pseudo-Random Bits," SIAM Journal on Computing, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 850–864, 1984.