Shafi Goldwasser
- Associated organizations
- Weizmann Institute of Science
- Fields of study
- Cryptography
Biography
Shafi Goldwasser is one of the key figures responsible for the success of modern cryptography in providing secure electronic data transmission and exchange. In 1983, her work on probabilistic encryption with Silvio Micali demonstrated how to use randomness to define and achieve semantic security. She produced one of the most celebrated results in modern cryptography in 1985 with her work on zero-knowledge proofs with Silvio Micali and Charles Rackoff. This special type of interactive proof allows one to prove possession of information or property without revealing the information itself. In the area of complexity theory, Dr. Goldwasser and co-authors showed a new method to classify the complexity of even approximating the solution of NP complete problems. With Oded Goldreich and Dana Ron, Dr. Goldwasser initiated the field of property testing of combinatorial objects such as graphs.
An IEEE Member, Dr. Goldwasser is currently the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.
