Shafrira Goldwasser (; born 1959) is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the former director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, and co-founder and chief scientist of Duality Technologies. In 2012, she and Silvio Micali won the ACM Turing Award.
Education and early life
Goldwasser was born in New York City and grew up in Tel Aviv. She and Blum proposed the Blum-Goldwasser cryptosystem.
In November 2016, along with several colleagues including Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Goldwasser co-founded Duality Technologies in order to commercialize fully homomorphic encryption. She is also a scientific advisor for several technology startups, including QED-it, specializing in the Zero Knowledge Blockchain, and Algorand, a pure proof-of-stake blockchain founded by her collaborator Silvio Micali.
On January 1, 2018, she became the director of Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, a position she held until August 2024.
Research
Goldwasser's research areas include computational complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory.
In 1984, along with Silvio Micali, she introduced probabilistic encryption, which has become the basis for most public-key cryptographic schemes.
In complexity theory, she has worked on hardness of approximation and its connections to interactive proofs and the PCP theorem. She has also developed protocols for delegating computations to untrusted servers. With Joe Kilian, she developed a primality test using elliptic curves. Goldwasser is also a lead on Project CETI, an interdisciplinary initiative for translating the communication of sperm whales.
Awards and honors
Goldwasser was awarded the 2012 Turing Award along with Silvio Micali for having "pioneered the field of provable security, which laid the mathematical foundations that made modern cryptography possible."
Goldwasser has twice won the Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science: first in 1993 along with László Babai, Silvio Micali, Shlomo Moran, and Charles Rackoff (for "The knowledge complexity of interactive proof systems"), and again in 2001 along with Sanjeev Arora, Uriel Feige, Carsten Lund, László Lovász, Rajeev Motwani, Shmuel Safra, Madhu Sudan, and Mario Szegedy (for Interactive Proofs and the Hardness of Approximating Cliques). She also received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1996 and the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics in 1998.
In 2001 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2002 she gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. In 2004 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, In 2006, Berkeley awarded her its Computer Science Distinguished Alumni Award. She was selected as an IACR Fellow in 2007. Goldwasser received the 2008–2009 Athena Lecturer Award of the Association for Computing Machinery's Committee on Women in Computing. She is the recipient of The Franklin Institute's 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. She received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award in 2011.
Goldwasser was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2017. In July 2017, she was a plenary lecturer in the Mathematical Congress of the Americas. She received the 2018 Frontier of Knowledge award together with Micali, Rivest and Shamir.
In 2018, Goldwasser was awarded an honorary degree by her alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. In June 2019 Goldwasser was awarded an honorary doctorate of science by the University of Oxford. She was elected as a fellow of the UK's Royal Society in 2023.
Goldwasser is featured in the Notable Women in Computing cards. She won the Suffrage Science award in 2016. She was awarded the 2021 L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science Award in Computer Science.
Personal life
Goldwasser has two sons.