Hugo Krawczyk is an Argentine-Israeli cryptographer best known for co-inventing the

HMAC In cryptography, an HMAC (sometimes expanded as either keyed-hash message authentication code or hash-based message authentication code) is a specific type of message authentication code (MAC) involving a cryptographic hash function and a se ...

message authentication algorithm and contributing in fundamental ways to the cryptographic architecture of central Internet standards, including IPsec, IKE, and

SSL/TLS Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network, such as the Internet. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, b ...

. In particular, both IKEv2 and TLS 1.3 use Krawczyk’s SIGMA protocol as the cryptographic core of their key exchange procedures. He has also contributed foundational work in the areas of

threshold Threshold may refer to: Science Biology * Threshold (reference value) * Absolute threshold * Absolute threshold of hearing * Action potential * Aerobic threshold * Anaerobic threshold * Dark adaptation threshold * Epidemic threshold * Flicke ...

and

proactive Proactivity or proactive behavior refers to self-initiated behavior that endeavours to solve a problem before it has occurred. Proactive behavior involves acting in advance of a future situation, rather than reacting. It refers to taking control ...

cryptosystems and searchable symmetric encryption, among others.

Education

Krawczyk acquired a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from the

University of Haifa The University of Haifa (, ) is a public research university located on Mount Carmel in Haifa, Israel. Founded in 1963 as a branch of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Haifa received full academic accreditation as an inde ...

. Later he received his Master of Science and Ph.D. in computer science from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology with

Oded Goldreich Oded Goldreich (; born 1957) is a professor of computer science at the faculty of mathematics and computer science of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. His research interests lie within the theory of computation and are, specifically, ...

as doctoral thesis advisor.

Career

Hugo Krawczyk is a senior principal scientist at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Between 2019 and 2023 he was a Principal Researcher at the

Algorand Algorand is a proof-of-stake blockchain and cryptocurrency. Algorand's native cryptocurrency is called ALGO. The SEC has filed several lawsuits alleging ALGO is a security which is subject to regulation under U.S. securities laws, along with a ...

Foundation and part of its founding team. Prior to that, he was an

IBM Fellow An IBM Fellow is a position at IBM appointed by the CEO. Typically only four to nine (eleven in 2014) IBM Fellows are appointed each year, in May or June. Fellow is the highest honor a scientist, engineer, or programmer at IBM can achieve. Over ...

and Distinguished Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York as a member of the Cryptography Research group from 1992 to 1997, and again from 2004 to 2019. He was an associate professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technion in Israel from 1997 until 2004. Krawczyk has published over 100 papers wit
more than 30,000 citations
and is an inventor in 30 issued patents. His research includes both theoretical and applied elements of cryptography, with a focus on internet security, privacy, and authentication. His most recent projects in the area include: TLS 1.3, the new-generation SSL/TLS;

HKDF HKDF is a simple key derivation function (KDF) based on the HMAC message authentication code. It was initially proposed by its authors as a building block in various protocols and applications, as well as to discourage the proliferation of multipl ...

, the standard for key derivation embraced by TLS 1.3,

Signal A signal is both the process and the result of transmission of data over some media accomplished by embedding some variation. Signals are important in multiple subject fields including signal processing, information theory and biology. In ...

WhatsApp WhatsApp (officially WhatsApp Messenger) is an American social media, instant messaging (IM), and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by technology conglomerate Meta. It allows users to send text, voice messages and video messages, make vo ...

Facebook Messenger Messenger, formerly known as Facebook Messenger, is an American proprietary instant messaging service developed by Meta Platforms. Originally developed as Facebook Chat in 2008, the client application of Messenger is currently available o ...

, and others; and

OPAQUE Opacity is the measure of impenetrability to electromagnetic or other kinds of radiation, especially visible light. In radiative transfer, it describes the absorption and scattering of radiation in a medium, such as a plasma, dielectric, shie ...

, a password authentication protocol being standardized by the IRTF and recently deployed by Facebook in its implementation of end-to-end encrypted chat backups for WhatsApp. Krawczyk is the author of many other cryptographic algorithms and protocols including the HMQV key-exchange protocol, the LFSR-based

Toeplitz Hash Algorithm The Toeplitz Hash Algorithm describes hash functions that compute hash values through matrix multiplication of the key with a suitable Toeplitz matrix In linear algebra, a Toeplitz matrix or diagonal-constant matrix, named after Otto Toeplitz, i ...

, the

Shrinking Generator In cryptography, the shrinking generator is a form of pseudorandom number generator intended to be used in a stream cipher. It was published in Crypto 1993 by Don Coppersmith, Hugo Krawczyk and Yishay Mansour. The shrinking generator uses two li ...

encryption scheme, the

UMAC UMAC may refer to: *UMAC (cryptography), a type of message authentication code *University of Macau *Upper Midwest Athletic Conference The Upper Midwest Athletic Conference (UMAC) is an intercollegiate athletic conference that competes in the N ...

message authentication code, and the randomized hashing scheme for strengthening digital signatures. Other influential work includes

and

cryptosystems (including

distributed key generation Distributed key generation (DKG) is a cryptographic process in which multiple parties contribute to the calculation of a shared public and private key set. Unlike most public key encryption models, distributed key generation does not rely on Tru ...

), searchable symmetric encryption, and theoretical contributions to secure cryptographic communications, password protocols, zero knowledge and pseudorandomness.

Awards

Krawczyk has won the

RSA Conference Award for Excellence in Mathematics RSA may refer to: Organizations Academia and education *Rabbinical Seminary of America, a yeshiva in New York City *Regional Science Association International (formerly the Regional Science Association), a US-based learned society *Renaissance So ...

in 2015, the Levchin Prize for Contributions to Real-World Cryptography in 2018, and two IBM corporate awards. He is a Fellow of the International Association of Cryptologic Research (IACR) and the recipient of the 2019 NDSS Test-of-Time award for his 1996 paper, “SKEME: A versatile secure key exchange mechanism for internet”, a precursor of KEM-based key exchange protocols, central to developing post-quantum key exchange standards.

References

External links

Google scholar

Research Gate
{{DEFAULTSORT:Krawczyk, Hugo Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Cryptographers