Ron Rivest

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ronald Linn Rivest is an American cryptographer and professor at MIT who, together with Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, invented the RSA public-key cryptosystem in 1977. RSA enabled the first practical implementation of public-key cryptography and remains the backbone of internet security. Rivest is also the inventor of several widely-used hash functions and stream ciphers: the MD4 and MD5 hash functions (used extensively before being superseded by SHA-2), the RC4 stream cipher (widely deployed in SSL/TLS and WEP), and the RC5 and RC6 block ciphers. He designed the MD6 hash function submitted to the NIST hash competition. Rivest has also contributed to verifiable election systems, co-developing the ThreeBallot voting system, and has been active in electronic voting security. He is the co-author of the influential textbook Introduction to Algorithms (CLRS), one of the most widely used computer science textbooks worldwide. Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman received the 2002 ACM Turing Award.