Dan Boneh (; ) is an Israeli–American professor in applied
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
computer security
Computer security (also cybersecurity, digital security, or information technology (IT) security) is a subdiscipline within the field of information security. It consists of the protection of computer software, systems and computer network, n ...
at
Stanford University
Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
.
In 2016, Boneh was elected a member of the
National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...
for contributions to the theory and practice of cryptography and computer security.
Biography
Born in
Israel
Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in West Asia. It Borders of Israel, shares borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the south-west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Isr ...
in 1969, Boneh obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...
in 1996 under the supervision of
Richard J. Lipton.
Boneh is one of the principal contributors to the development of
pairing-based cryptography Pairing-based cryptography is the use of a pairing between elements of two cryptographic Group (mathematics), groups to a third group with a mapping e :G_1 \times G_2 \to G_T to construct or analyze Cryptosystem, cryptographic systems.
Definition
T ...
, along with
Matt Franklin of the
University of California, Davis
The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Davis, California, United States. It is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University ...
. He joined the faculty of
Stanford University
Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
in 1997, and became professor 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, ...
and
electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
. He teaches
massive open online course
A massive open online course (MOOC ) or an open online course is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the World Wide Web, Web. In addition to traditional course materials, such as filmed lectures, readings, and p ...
s on the online learning platform
Coursera. In 1999, he was awarded a fellowship from the
David and Lucile Packard Foundation. In 2002, he co-founded a company called Voltage Security with three of his students. The company was acquired by
Hewlett-Packard
The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California ...
in 2015.
In 2018, Boneh became co-director (with David Mazières) of the newly founded Center for Blockchain Research at Stanford, predicting at the time that "
Blockchain
The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of th ...
s will become increasingly critical to doing business globally." Dr. Boneh is also known for putting his entire introductory cryptography course online for free. The course is also available via Coursera.
Awards
* 2021 Fellow of the
American Mathematical Society
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...
* 2020
Selfridge Prize with Jonathan Love
* 2016 Elected to the US
National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...
* 2016
Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery
* 2014
ACM Prize in Computing (formerly called the ACM-Infosys Foundation award)
* 2013
Gödel Prize, with
Matthew K. Franklin and
Antoine Joux, for his work on the
Boneh–Franklin scheme
* 2005
RSA Award
* 1999
Sloan Research Fellowship
* 1999 Packard Award
Publications
Boneh's primary research focuses is on the area of cryptography where he has worked in numerous areas.
Identity-Based Encryption
In 1984
Adi Shamir proposed the possibility of
identity-based encryption
Identity-based encryption (IBE), is an important primitive of identity-based cryptography. As such it is a type of public-key encryption in which the public key of a user is some unique information about the identity of the user (e.g. a user's ema ...
(IBE), which allows people to send encrypted messages to each other by using a public key derived from the recipients identity. Boneh, with
Matt Franklin, proposed one of the first identity-based encryption schemes based on the
Weil pairing. The
Boneh-Franklin scheme remains an active area of research. In 2010 Boneh (with Shweta Agrawal and Xavier Boyen) introduced an IBE scheme from the
learning with errors
In cryptography, learning with errors (LWE) is a mathematical problem that is widely used to create secure encryption algorithms. It is based on the idea of representing secret information as a set of equations with errors. In other words, LWE is ...
assumption.
Homomorphic Encryption
A
homomorphic encryption
Homomorphic encryption is a form of encryption that allows computations to be performed on encrypted data without first having to decrypt it. The resulting computations are left in an encrypted form which, when decrypted, result in an output th ...
algorithm is one where a user can perform computation on encrypted data, without decrypting it. Boneh's has developed several improvements of homomorphic cryptosystems. For example, with Eu-Jin Goh and Kobbi Nissim in 2005 Boneh proposed a "partially homomorphic cryptosystem".
Timing attacks
Timing attacks are a type of
side-channel attack that allows an adversary to attack a security system by studying now long it takes to perform certain calculations. In 2003, Boneh (with
David Brumley) proposed one of the first practical timing attacks on
OpenSSL that worked over the Internet. He then later showed how to extend the attack, "show
ngthat the time web sites take to respond to HTTP requests can leak private information."
Other significant work
Some of Boneh's other results in cryptography and computer security include:
* 2018: Verifiable Delay Functions
* 2015: Privacy-preserving proofs of solvency for
Bitcoin
Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; Currency symbol, sign: ₿) is the first Decentralized application, decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 when an unknown entity published a white paper under ...
exchanges
* 2010: He was involved in designing
tcpcrypt, TCP extensions for transport-level security
* 2005: A partially
homomorphic cryptosystem (with Eu-Jin Goh and
Kobbi Nissim)
* 2005: The first broadcast encryption system with full collision resistance (with
Craig Gentry and Brent Waters)
* 1999: Cryptanalysis of
RSA when the private key is less than N
0.292 (with Glenn Durfee)
* 1997: Fault-based cryptanalysis of public-key systems (with
Richard J. Lipton and
Richard DeMillo)
* 1995: Collision resistant fingerprinting codes for digital data (with James Shaw)
* 1995: Cryptanalysis using a DNA computer (with Christopher Dunworth and Richard J. Lipton)
* 2005: PwdHash a browser extension that transparently produces a different password for each site
References
External links
Dan Boneh's Home PageDan Boneh's Stanford Research Group
{{DEFAULTSORT:Boneh, Dan
Living people
1969 births
Israeli computer scientists
Modern cryptographers
Public-key cryptographers
Computer security academics
Stanford University School of Engineering faculty
Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering faculty
Israeli cryptographers
Princeton University alumni
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology alumni
Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
2016 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Gödel Prize laureates
Simons Investigator
Recipients of the ACM Prize in Computing
People associated with cryptocurrency
Jewish Israeli atheists
Israeli atheists