Charles Weill Rackoff is an American cryptologist. Born and raised in New York City, he attended

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

as both an undergraduate and graduate student, and earned a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1974. He spent a year as a postdoctoral scholar at

INRIA The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) () is a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics. It was created under the name French Institute for Research in Comp ...

in France. Rackoff currently works at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university whose main campus is located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded by ...

. His research interests are in

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 ...

. For some time now, he has been specializing in

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), ...

and security protocols. In 1988, he collaborated with Michael Luby in a widely cited analysis of the

Feistel cipher In cryptography, a Feistel cipher (also known as Luby–Rackoff block cipher) is a symmetric structure used in the construction of block ciphers, named after the German-born physicist and cryptographer Horst Feistel, who did pioneering resear ...

construction (one important result shown there is the construction of a strongly pseudo random permutation generator from a pseudo random function generator). Rackoff was awarded the 1993

Gödel Prize The Gödel Prize is an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, given jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery Special Inter ...

for his work on interactive proof systems and for being one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs. In 2011, he won the

RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics Formally called since 2025 The RSAC Conference Award for Excellence in Mathematics, is an annual award. It is announced at the annual RSA Conference in recognition of innovations and contributions in the field of cryptography. An award committee o ...

for his various contributions to cryptography. Rackoff's controversial comments on the 2000 memorial for the victims of the Montreal Massacre were reported in the Canadian media.

Selected publications

* S. Goldwasser, S. Micali and C. Rackoff, "The knowledge complexity of interactive proof systems",

SIAM Journal on Computing The ''SIAM Journal on Computing'' is a scientific journal focusing on the mathematical and formal aspects of computer science. It is published by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Although its official ISO abbreviation i ...

, 18, 1989, pp. 186–208. * C. Rackoff and D. Simon, "Non-interactive zero-knowledge proof of knowledge and the chosen cipertext attack", in Proceedings of Crypto 91, pp. 433–444. * C. Rackoff and D. Simon, "Cryptographic defense against traffic analysis", in Proceedings of the 25th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, May 1993, pp. 672–681.

References

Living people 1948 births Scientists from New York City American computer scientists American cryptographers Modern cryptographers Gödel Prize laureates MIT School of Engineering alumni Academic staff of the University of Toronto International Association for Cryptologic Research fellows Mathematicians from New York (state) {{crypto-bio-stub