Formally called since 2025 The RSAC Conference Award for Excellence in Mathematics, is an annual award. It is announced at the annual

RSA Conference The RSA Conference is a series of IT security conferences. Approximately 45,000 people attend one of the conferences each year. It was founded in 1991 as a small cryptography conference. RSA conferences take place in the United States, Europe, Asia ...

in recognition of innovations and contributions in the field 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), ...

. An award committee of experts, which is associated with the Cryptographer's Track committee at the RSA Conference (CT-RSA), nominates to the award persons who are pioneers in their field, and whose work has had applied or theoretical lasting value; the award is typically given for the lifetime achievements throughout the nominee's entire career. Nominees are often affiliated with universities or involved with research and development in the information technology industry. The award is cosponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research. While the field of modern cryptography started to be an active research area in the 1970s, it has already contributed heavily to

Information technology Information technology (IT) is a set of related fields within information and communications technology (ICT), that encompass computer systems, software, programming languages, data processing, data and information processing, and storage. Inf ...

and has served as a critical component in advancing the world of computing: the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

Cellular network A cellular network or mobile network is a telecommunications network where the link to and from end nodes is wireless network, wireless and the network is distributed over land areas called ''cells'', each served by at least one fixed-locatio ...

s, and

Cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

Information privacy Information privacy is the relationship between the collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, contextual information norms, and the legal and political issues surrounding them. It is also known as dat ...

, Privacy engineering,

Anonymity Anonymity describes situations where the acting person's identity is unknown. Anonymity may be created unintentionally through the loss of identifying information due to the passage of time or a destructive event, or intentionally if a person cho ...

, Storage security, and

Information security Information security is the practice of protecting information by mitigating information risks. It is part of information risk management. It typically involves preventing or reducing the probability of unauthorized or inappropriate access to data ...

, to mention just a few sectors and areas. Research in Cryptography as a scientific field involves the disciplines of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Engineering. The award, which started in 1998, is one of the few recognitions fully dedicated to acknowledging experts who have advanced the field of cryptography and its related areas (another such recognition is achieving the rank of an IACR Fellow). The first recipient of the award in 1998 was

Shafi Goldwasser Shafrira Goldwasser (; born 1959) is an Israeli-American computer scientist. A winner of the Turing Award in 2012, she is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; a professor o ...

. Also, many of the award winners have gotten other recognitions, such as other prestigious awards, and the rank of fellow in various professional societies, etc. Research in Cryptography is broad and is dedicated to numerous areas. In fact, the award has, over the years, emphasized the methodological contributions to the field which involve mathematical research in various ways, and has recognized achievements in many of the following crucial areas of research: * Some areas are in the general

Computational number theory In mathematics and computer science, computational number theory, also known as algorithmic number theory, is the study of computational methods for investigating and solving problems in number theory and arithmetic geometry, including algorithm ...

and Computational algebra fields, or in the fields of

Information theory Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification (science), quantification, Data storage, storage, and telecommunications, communication of information. The field was established and formalized by Claude Shannon in the 1940s, ...

and

Computational complexity theory In theoretical computer science and mathematics, computational complexity theory focuses on classifying computational problems according to their resource usage, and explores the relationships between these classifications. A computational problem ...

, where proper mathematical structures are constructed or investigated as underlying mathematics to be employed in the field of cryptography; * Some areas are theoretical in nature, where new notions for

Cryptographic primitive Cryptographic primitives are well-established, low-level cryptography, cryptographic algorithms that are frequently used to build cryptographic protocols for computer security systems. These routines include, but are not limited to, one-way hash fun ...

s are defined and their security is carefully formalized as foundations of the field, some work is influenced by

Quantum computing A quantum computer is a computer that exploits quantum mechanical phenomena. On small scales, physical matter exhibits properties of wave-particle duality, both particles and waves, and quantum computing takes advantage of this behavior using s ...

as well; * Some areas are dedicated to designing new or improved primitives from concrete or abstract mathematical mechanisms for Symmetric-key cryptography,

Public-key cryptography Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is the field of cryptographic systems that use pairs of related keys. Each key pair consists of a public key and a corresponding private key. Key pairs are generated with cryptographic alg ...

, and

Cryptographic protocol A cryptographic protocol is an abstract or concrete Communications protocol, protocol that performs a information security, security-related function and applies cryptographic methods, often as sequences of cryptographic primitives. A protocol desc ...

s (such as Zero-knowledge proofs, Secure multi-party computations, or Threshold cryptosystems); * Some other areas are dedicated to

Cryptanalysis Cryptanalysis (from the Greek ''kryptós'', "hidden", and ''analýein'', "to analyze") refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic se ...

: the breaking of cryptographic systems and mechanisms; * Yet some other areas are dedicated to the actual practice of cryptography and its efficient cryptographic hardware and software implementations, to developing and deploying new actual protocols (such as the

Transport Layer Security 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 ...

and IPsec) to be used by information technology applications and systems. Also included are research areas where principles and basic methods are developed for achieving security and privacy in computing and communication systems. To further read on various aspects of cryptography, from history to areas of modern research, see Books on cryptography. In addition to the Award for Excellence in Mathematics which recognizes lifetime achievement in the specific area of Cryptographic research, the RSA conference has also presented a separate lifetime achievement awards in the more general field of information security. Past recipients of this award from the field of cryptography include: * Taher Elgamal (2009), * Whitfield Diffie (2010), * Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman (2011), and * Martin Hellman (2012) * Burt Kaliski (2025)

Past recipients

Notes

Here are a few examples of videos from the award ceremonies and interviews with award winners; these give some more information about each specific award year, and demonstrate the breadth of research behind each such an award: * 2009 Interview with V. Miller * 2009 Interview with N. Koblitz * 2013 Award ceremony: J.-J. Quisquater and C. P. Schnorr: * 2014 Award ceremony: B. Preneel: * 2015 Award ceremony: I.B. Damgård and H. Krawczyk * 2016 Award ceremony: U. Maurer * 2019 Award ceremony video: T. Rabin, and the Cryptographer's panel. * 2020 Award ceremony video: J. Daemen and V. Rijmen. * 2021 Award ceremony video: D. Pointcheval * 2023 Award ceremony video. * 2024 Award ceremony video.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:RSAC Conference Award for Excellence in Mathematics Mathematics awards Computer science awards Cryptography

Past recipients

See also

Notes

References