Silvio Micali (born October 13, 1954) is an Italian computer scientist, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the founder of Algorand, a proof-of-stake blockchain cryptocurrency protocol. Micali's research at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory centers on cryptography and information security.
In 2012, he and Shafi Goldwasser received the Turing Award for their work on cryptography. for research supervised by Manuel Blum. His research interests are cryptography, zero knowledge, pseudorandom generation, secure protocols, and mechanism design.
Career
Micali is best known for some of his fundamental early work on public-key cryptosystems, pseudorandom functions, digital signatures, oblivious transfer, secure multiparty computation, and is one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs.
While a graduate student, Micali collaborated with another student, Shafi Goldwasser, to introduce the concept of probabilistic encryption. In this scheme, a message can be encrypted randomly to multiple different ciphertexts, providing semantic security because a pair of ciphertexts are indistinguishable even when an attacker can choose which messages they come from. Micali and his advisor Manuel Blum also developed a pseudorandom generator at this time, the Blum-Micali algorithm.
Micali, Goldwasser, and Charles Rackoff invented interactive proofs in the 1980s, at the same time as László Babai and Shlomo Moran. In an interactive proof system, participants develop a proof by answering a series of questions.
Micali's former doctoral students include Mihir Bellare, Bonnie Berger, Shai Halevi, Rafail Ostrovsky, and Phillip Rogaway.
In the early 2000s, Micali also founded Peppercoin, a micropayments system which was acquired in 2007. In 2017, he founded Algorand.
Awards and honors
Micali won the Gödel Prize in 1993, along with Goldwasser, Rackoff, Babai and Moran, for their work inventing interactive proofs. In 2007, he was selected to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He received the Turing Award The Turing Award is considered the Nobel Prize of computing.
In 2015 the University of Salerno acknowledged his studies by giving him an honoris causa degree in Computer Science.
He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2017.