RSA Conference Award for Excellence in Mathematics

Starting in 2022, the IACR has agreed to co-sponsor the RSA Conference Award for Excellence in Mathematics. An announcement about the winner(s) for the year will be made around May each year. Past winners are listed below in reverse chronological order, from most to least recent.

Year Recipient Contribution(s)
2024 Craig Gentry & Oded Regev For major contributions to lattice-based cryptographic encryption, especially for the highly utilized "Learning with Errors"-based cryptosystem, and the first "Fully Homomorphic Encryption" cryptosystem.
2023 Paul Carl Kocher For pioneering contributions to cryptographic hardware, and side-channel attacks in particular.
2022 Cynthia Dwork & Moni Naor For contributions to the foundation of privacy and to the foundations of cryptography.
2021 David Pointcheval For developing provable security arguments for applied public-key cryptographic systems and protocols.
2020 Joan Daemen & Vincent Rijmen For major contributions to symmetric key cryptography, including the development of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).
2019 Tal Rabin For contributions to distributed cryptographic protocols: multi-party computations, threshold cryptography, and signature schemes.
2018 Ran Canetti For contributions to the foundations of secure multi-party computation.
Rafail Ostrovsky For contributions to the theory and to new variants of secure multi-party computations.
2017 Tatsuaki Okamoto For contributions to numerous primitives and protocols within public-key cryptography.
2016 Ueli Maurer For contributions to information-theoretic cryptography and to analysis of cryptographic schemes.
2015 Ivan Damgård For contributions to cryptographic hashing principles and to cryptographic protocols.
Hugo Krawczyk For contributions to hashing-based message authentication codes and to applied key-agreement protocols.
2014 Bart Preneel For contributions to applied cryptography and to the cryptanalysis and design of cryptographic hash functions.
2013 Jean-Jacques Quisquater For contributions to cryptographic engineering: hardware, standards, and practical zero-knowledge authentication.
Claus P. Schnorr For contributions to hardware oriented efficient practical zero-knowledge authentication and signatures.
2012 Eli Biham For symmetric key cryptanalysis, in particular for co-inventing differential cryptanalysis.
Mitsuru Matsui For symmetric key cryptanalysis, in particular for inventing linear cryptanalysis.
2011 Charles Rackoff For computational complexity oriented cryptography, including co-inventing zero-knowledge proofs.
2010 David Chaum For innovating cryptographic anonymity primitives.
2009 Neal Koblitz & Victor Miller For inventing elliptic-curve cryptography.
2008 Arjen Lenstra For contributions to computational number theory, including to integer factorization.
2007 Jacques Stern For contributions to mathematical techniques underlying proofs of cryptographic protocols and cryptanalysis.
2006 Oded Goldreich For basic contributions to the foundations of cryptography.
2005 Dan Boneh For innovative designs of cryptographic primitives.
2004 Silvio Micali For pioneering theoretical foundations of modern cryptography.
2003 Mihir Bellare & Phillip Rogaway For major contributions to practice-oriented secure cryptography.
2002 Don Coppersmith For exceptional contributions to symmetric and asymmetric cryptanalysis.
2001 Scott Vanstone For outstanding contributions to applied cryptography.
2000 Ralph Merkle For co-inventing public-key cryptography: the idea of key exchange and the Merkle's Puzzles.
1999 John Pollard For major contributions to algebraic cryptanalysis of integer factorization and discrete logarithm.
1998 Shafi Goldwasser For pioneering theoretical foundations of modern cryptography.