Shamir: The Engineer, Builder and Tester of the Information Age — From Innovators to Cyber Punks, a New World Evolves
Introduction
I love cryptography, and believe that cryptography can help build a more trusted world. And many of things I touch in cryptography seem to have had the hands of Adi Shamir on them. He is a truly stunning academic and researcher, in that way that academics used to be.
Ever computer science student knows Shamir from the ‘S’ in the RSA (Rivest, Shamir, and Aldeman) method, but few perhaps know that he had a hand in creating many of the new methods that we currently use in creating trust within our infrastructures. It is thus Shamir’s work which will play a strong part in building the foundation of a distributed Internet — and this time it will be built correctly. Many of our existing problems with security — phishing, malware, Denial of Service — have been caused because the original building blocks were flawed, and we have not been able to fix them properly.
While the RSA is still going strong after more than 40 years, his foundation work on zero-knowledge proofs is still going strong, and is helping transactions to stay anonymise within a blockchain world.
His secret share methods, too, are now being used within blockchain transactions to define the…
