Moni Naor () is an Israeli

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, currently a professor at the

Weizmann Institute of Science The Weizmann Institute of Science ( ''Machon Weizmann LeMada'') is a Public university, public research university in Rehovot, Israel, established in 1934, fourteen years before the State of Israel was founded. Unlike other List of Israeli uni ...

. Naor received his Ph.D. in 1989 at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. His advisor was

Manuel Blum Manuel Blum (born 26 April 1938) is a Venezuelan-born American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1995 "In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography ...

. He works in various fields of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

, mainly the foundations of

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logy, -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of Adversary (cryptography), ...

. He is notable for initiating research on public key systems secure against chosen ciphertext attack and creating non-malleable cryptography, visual cryptography (with Adi Shamir), and suggesting various methods for verifying that users of a computer system are human (leading to the notion of

CAPTCHA Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) ( ) is a type of challenge–response authentication, challenge–response turing test used in computing to determine whether the user is human in order to de ...

). His research on Small-bias sample space, give a general framework for combining small k-wise independent spaces with small

\epsilon

-biased spaces to obtain

\delta

-almost k-wise independent spaces of small size. In 1994 he was the first, with Amos Fiat, to formally study the problem of practical broadcast encryption. Along with Benny Chor, Amos Fiat, and Benny Pinkas, he made a contribution to the development of Traitor tracing, a

copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of Copyright#Scope, works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the c ...

detection system which works by tracing the source of leaked files rather than by direct

copy protection Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy prevention and copy restriction, is any measure to enforce copyright by preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media. Copy protection is most commonly found on vid ...

Bibliography

* Cynthia Dwork, Jeff Lotspiech and Moni Naor, ''Digital Signets: Self-Enforcing Protection of Digital Information.'' * Dalit Naor, Moni Naor and Jeff Lotspiech, ''Revocation and Tracing Schemes for Stateless Receivers.'' * David Chaum, Amos Fiat and Moni Naor, ''Untraceable Electronic Cash,'' 1990''.'' * Amos Fiat and Moni Naor, ''Implicit O(1) Probe Search,'' SIAM J. Computing 22: 1-10 (1993). * Amos Fiat and Moni Naor, ''Broadcast Encryption,'' 1994''.'' * Moni Naor and Benny Pinkas, ''Threshold Traitor Tracing'', Crypto 98. * Moni Naor and Benny Pinkas, ''Efficient Trace and Revoke Schemes'', FC'2000. * Benny Chor, Amos Fiat, Moni Naor and Benny Pinkas, ''Tracing Traitors'', IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 46(3), pp. 893–910, 2000.

Honors and awards

* 2008: Named an IACR fellow * 2014: The Gödel Prize (with co-authors) * 2016: The Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

(with Amos Fiat) * 2022: The 30-year Test-of-Time STOC Award for his 1991 STOC paper “Non-Malleable Cryptography” (with Cynthia Dwork and Danny Dolev) * 2022: RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics (with Cynthia Dwork) * 2024: Rothschild Prize in Computer Science for 2024The Rothschild Prize
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References

Sources

Moni Naor's website at the Weizmann Institute

Verification of a human in the loop or Identification via the Turing Test

Visual Cryptography
*

Israeli cryptographers University of California, Berkeley alumni Academic staff of Weizmann Institute of Science Israeli theoretical computer scientists Researchers in distributed computing Technion – Israel Institute of Technology alumni Educators from Haifa Living people 1961 births International Association for Cryptologic Research fellows Gödel Prize laureates {{Israel-scientist-stub