Silvio Micali

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Silvio Micali is an Italian computer scientist and Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He shared the 2012 Turing Award with Shafi Goldwasser for transformative work in the theory of cryptography and the introduction of zero-knowledge proofs. Micali and Goldwasser, together with Charles Rackoff, introduced the concept of zero-knowledge proofs in their foundational 1985 paper The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof Systems. A zero-knowledge proof is an interactive protocol in which a prover can convince a verifier that a statement is true without revealing any information beyond the truth of the statement itself—a remarkable cryptographic primitive with far-reaching implications. Zero-knowledge proofs are now central to privacy-preserving authentication, privacy-preserving blockchains (like Zcash), and scalable blockchain verification systems (zk-SNARKs, zk-STARKs). With Goldwasser, Micali also developed the concept of semantic security for public-key encryption, providing the first rigorous definition of what it means for an encryption scheme to be computationally secure, and proved that the probabilistic encryption scheme they introduced achieves this definition. Micali has made additional contributions to pseudorandom function generators, verifiable random functions (VRFs), and multi-party computation. In recent years, he founded Algorand, a blockchain platform based on a novel Byzantine agreement protocol he designed that achieves fast finality and security under adversarial conditions. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.