Ran Canetti (Hebrew: רן קנטי) is an Israeli cryptographer. He is a professor of Computer Science at Boston University. He also serves as a director of the Check Point Institute for Information Security at Tel-Aviv University and as a director of the Center for Reliable Information System and Cyber Security at Boston University. His work includes research in many areas of cryptography, with a focus on creating, studying, and using methods to keep information safe.

Biography

Canetti was born in 1962 in Tel Aviv. He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 1989, a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1990, and a master’s degree in computer science in 1991, all from the Technion. He received a doctorate in 1995 from the Weizmann Institute, with guidance from Oded Goldreich. From 1995 to 1996, he worked as a researcher at MIT alongside Shafi Goldwasser. After that, he joined IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center and remained a research staff member until 2008.

Since July 2011, Canetti has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Boston University. He also became the director for research at the Center for Reliable Information Systems and Cyber Security (RISCS) at Boston University in September 2011. Currently, he leads the Check Point Institute of Information Security at Tel Aviv University. He serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Cryptology and for Information and Computation. Additionally, he advises Identiq, a network that helps verify identities through peer-to-peer connections.

Canetti is known for his work in cryptography, both in theory and practice. In 1996, he helped create the Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC) and developed the Universally Composable Security framework with Mihir Bellare and Hugo Krawczyk. This framework provides a way to analyze the security of cryptographic protocols in a clear and strong manner.

Recognition

Canetti received the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics in 2018. He is a Fellow of the Association of Cryptologic Research. He received the IBM Research Outstanding Innovation Award in 2006, the IBM Corporate Award in 2005, the IBM Research Division Award in 1999, two IBM Best Paper Awards, and the Kennedy Thesis Award from The Weizmann Institute.

• RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics, 2018
• IBM Research Outstanding Innovation Award, 2006. Given for work that helped create strong modern cryptography systems.
• IBM Corporate Award, 2005. Given for the lasting importance of the HMAC algorithm.
• IBM Research Best Paper Award, 2004
• IBM Research Outstanding Innovation Award, 2004
• IBM Research Best Paper Award, 2001
• IBM Research Division Award, 1999. Given for helping develop the IPSEC standard.
• IBM Innovation Award, 1997. Given for creating the HMAC message authentication function.
• The Kennedy Thesis Award, The Weizmann Institute, 1996
• The Rothschild post-doctoral scholarship (Rothschild Fellowship), 1995–6
• The Gutwirth Special Excellence Fellowship, the Technion, 1992

Canetti has given speeches at major conferences around the world. Some of his notable talks include:

• "Composable Formal Security Analysis: Juggling Soundness, Simplicity and Efficiency," presented at ICALP 2008 in Reykjavik, Iceland, 2008. See the accompanying paper.
• "Obtaining Universally Composable Security: Towards the Bare Bones of Trust," presented at AsiaCrypt 2007 in Kuching, Malaysia, December 2007. Slides (PDF). See also the accompanying paper.
• "How to Obtain and Assert Composable Security," presented at the 16th Usenix Security Symposium in Boston, MA, August 2007. Slides (PDF) and audio recording (mp3).
• "Universally Composable Security with Global Set-Up," presented at IPAM Program on Applications and Foundations of Cryptography and Computer Security, UCLA, November 2006. Slides (PDF).
• "Security and Composition of Cryptographic Protocols: A Tutorial," presented at IPAM Program on Applications and Foundations of Cryptography and Computer Security, UCLA, September 2006. Slides (PDF). See also the accompanying paper.
• "The HMAC Construction: A Decade Later," presented at MIT CIS Seminar, December 2005. Slides (PDF).

Personal life

Canetti resides in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is married to Ronitt Rubinfeld. They have two daughters.

Selected works

Ran Canetti has invented patents and contributed to approved standards, including the following:

• R. Canetti, S. Halevi, M. Steiner. Mitigating Dictionary Attacks on Password-Based Local Storage. Patent application submitted August 2006.
• R. Canetti, M. Charikar, R. Kumar, S. Rajagopalan, A. Sahai, A. Tomkins. Non-Transferable Anonymous Credentials. U.S. Patent No. 7,222,362, May 2007.
• R. Canetti and A. Herzberg, A Mechanism for Keeping a Key Secret from Mobile Eavesdroppers. U.S. Patent No. 5,412,723, May 1995.
• R. Canetti and A. Herzberg, Secure Communication and Computation in an Insecure Environment. U.S. Patent No. 5,469,507, November 1995.

• M. Baugher, R. Canetti, L. Dondeti, F. Lindholm, “Group Key Management Architecture,” Internet Engineering Task Force RFC 4046, 2005.
• A. Perrig, R. Canetti, B. Briscoe, D. Tygar, D. Song, “TESLA: Multicast Source Authentication Transform,” Internet Engineering Task Force RFC 4082, 2005.
• H. Krawczyk, M. Bellare, and R. Canetti, “HMAC: Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication,” Internet Engineering Task Force RFC 2104, February 1997. Also appears as an American National Standard Institute (ANSI) standard X9.71 (2000), and as a Federal Information Processing Standard No. 198, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 2002.

Ran Canetti has also written several books, including:

• Security and Composition of Cryptographic Protocols
• A chapter in Secure Multiparty Computation, edited by Manoj Prabhakaran and Amit Sahai.
• Cryptology and Information Security Series, IOS Press, 2013.
• A chapter in the Journal of Cryptology Special Issue on Byzantine Agreement. R. Canetti, (Ed.) Vol. 18, No. 3, 2005.
• A chapter on the Decisional Diffie-Hellman Assumption. Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security, edited by H. van Tilborg, Henk. Springer-Verlag, 2005.

• Bellare, Mihir; Canetti, Ran; Krawczyk, Hugo. Keying Hash Functions for Message Authentication, 1996
• R. Canetti, Universally Composable Security: A New Paradigm for Cryptographic Protocols. 42nd FOCS, 2001
• N. Bitansky, R. Canetti, O. Paneth, A. Rosen. On the Existence of Extractable One-Way Functions, STOC, 2014
• Ran Canetti, Yilei Chen, Leonid Reyzin, Ron D. Rothblum (2018): Fiat-Shamir and Correlation Intractability from Strong KDM-Secure Encryption. EUROCRYPT(1): 91-122.
• Ran Canetti, Ling Cheung, Dilsun Kirli Kaynar, Moses Liskov, Nancy A. Lynch, Olivier Pereira, Roberto Segala (2018): Task-structured Probabilistic I/O Automata. Journal of Computational System Sciences 94: 63-97.

Some of Ran Canetti’s past activities include co-organizing the Crypto in the Clouds Workshop at MIT (2009), co-organizing the CPIIS TAU/IDC Workshop on Electronic Voting (2009), and co-organizing the Theoretical Foundations of Practical Information Security Workshop (2008). He also led the Program Committee for the Theory of Cryptography Conference (2008) and served as co-chair of the Multicast Security Working Group at the Internet Engineering Task Force from 2000 to 2008.

Ran Canetti’s Full List of Publications (1990–2018)