Moti Yung

Moti Yung is a Security and Privacy Research Scientist with Google. He got his PhD from Columbia University in 1988. Previously, he was with IBM Research, Certco, RSA Laboratories, and Snap. He has also been an adjunct senior research faculty at Columbia, where he has co-advised and worked with PhD students.

Yung is a fellow of the IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). In 2010 he gave the IACR Distinguished Lecture. He is the recipient of the 2014 ACM’s SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation award, the 2014 ESORICS (European Symposium on Research in Computer Security) Outstanding Research award, an IBM Outstanding Innovation award, a Google OC award, and a Google founders’ award. In 2018 he received the IEEE-CS W. Wallace McDowell Award. In 2020 he received the test-of-time award for a paper predicting ransomware co-authored in 1996 in IEEE’s Symp. on Security and Privacy; also in 2020 he received the IACR’s PKC conference test-of-time award for a paper he co-authored in 1998.

Yung’s main professional interests are in Security, Privacy, and Cryptography. His contributions to research and development treat science and technology holistically: from the theoretical mathematical foundations, via conceptual mechanisms, to applied cryptography, and to participation in developing actual industrial products.

Yung’s work has been predicting future needs of secure systems, and analyzing coming threats. These led to basic theoretical and applied notions, like: malicious applications of cryptography: ransomware attacks, and cryptosystems subversion; distributed cryptography; concurrent sessions in authentication protocols, strong (chosen-ciphertext-secure) encryption, digital signatures from simplified cryptography, and the proactive protocol model, dealing with secure protocols against mobile adversaries. His industrial work gave rise to new diversified mechanisms, some of which are in extensive use. These include: authentication and key exchange in concurrent sessions; public-key based second factor authentication methodology; new factors for user identification; distributed signing methods; distributed certification authority; numerous very large scale (web and mobile) encryption schemes, including one supporting the advertisement exchange; anonymization of historical user data; transparency and control for web users; secure large scale distributed computation protocols for industrial privacy preserving data analytics; secure cloud storage; and privacy in Bluetooth Low Energy proximity services.

2021 IEEE CS Women of ENIAC Computer Pioneer Award