Shafrira Goldwasser (Hebrew: שפרירה גולדווסר; born 1959) is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She holds the RSA Professorship in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also serves as a professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Previously, she was the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. Additionally, she is a co-founder and chief scientist of Duality Technologies. In 2012, she and Silvio Micali received the ACM Turing Award.
Education and early life
Goldwasser was born in New York City and grew up in Tel Aviv. She returned to the United States and earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics and science in 1979 from Carnegie Mellon University. She received a master's degree in 1981 and a PhD in 1984 from the University of California, Berkeley, under the guidance of Manuel Blum.
While at Berkeley, Goldwasser studied cryptography and algorithmic number theory. She and Blum developed the Blum-Goldwasser cryptosystem. Along with Silvio Micali, another student at Berkeley, she introduced the concept of probabilistic encryption. This method allows a single message to be encrypted into multiple different ciphertexts, making it more difficult to break using chosen-plaintext attacks.
Career and research
Goldwasser joined MIT in 1983 and became the first person to hold the RSA Professorship in 1997. In 1993, she also became a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science at the same time as her job at MIT. She is part of the theory of computation group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
In November 2016, Goldwasser and colleagues, including Vinod Vaikuntanathan, started a company called Duality Technologies to turn fully homomorphic encryption into products that can be sold. She also works as a scientific advisor for technology companies like QED-it, which focuses on Zero Knowledge Blockchain, and Algorand, a blockchain system created by her collaborator Silvio Micali.
On January 1, 2018, she became the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. She held this position until August 2024.
Goldwasser’s research includes computational complexity theory, cryptography, and computational number theory. In 1984, she and Silvio Micali introduced probabilistic encryption, which became the foundation for most public-key cryptographic systems.
In 1985, Goldwasser, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff created zero-knowledge proofs, a key tool in cryptography that allows someone to prove the truth of a statement without sharing extra information. They studied interactive proofs, where a proof is built by answering questions about a problem. In the late 1980s, Micali’s group and the team of László Babai and Shlomo Moran separately wrote papers about interactive proofs. All of them later shared a Gödel prize for their work.
In complexity theory, Goldwasser has studied the difficulty of solving problems approximately and how this relates to interactive proofs and the PCP theorem. She has also created methods for sending tasks to untrusted servers. With Joe Kilian, she developed a test for prime numbers using elliptic curves. Goldwasser is also a leader in Project CETI, a project that brings together experts from different fields to study and translate the communication of sperm whales.
Awards and honors
Goldwasser received the 2012 Turing Award with Silvio Micali for helping create the field of provable security, which provided the math that made modern cryptography possible.
Goldwasser won the Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science twice. She first won it in 1993 with László Babai, Silvio Micali, Shlomo Moran, and Charles Rackoff for their work on "The knowledge complexity of interactive proof systems." She won it again in 2001 with Sanjeev Arora, Uriel Feige, Carsten Lund, László Lovász, Rajeev Motwani, Shmuel Safra, Madhu Sudan, and Mario Szegedy for their research on "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. In 2002, she gave a main lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. In 2004, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2005, she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for her work in cryptography, number theory, and complexity theory, and their use in privacy and security. In 2006, she received the Computer Science Distinguished Alumni Award from Berkeley. In 2007, she was selected as an IACR Fellow. In 2008–2009, she received the Athena Lecturer Award from the Association for Computing Machinery's Committee on Women in Computing. In 2010, she was given the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science by The Franklin Institute. In 2011, she received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award.
In 2017, she was elected as an ACM Fellow and gave a main lecture at the Mathematical Congress of the Americas. In 2018, she received the Frontier of Knowledge award with Micali, Rivest, and Shamir. That same year, she was given an honorary degree by Carnegie Mellon University, her alma mater. In 2019, she received an honorary doctorate of science from the University of Oxford. In 2023, she was elected as a fellow of the UK's Royal Society.
Goldwasser is included in the Notable Women in Computing cards. She received the Suffrage Science award in 2016. She served on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2020. In 2021, she was awarded the L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science Award in Computer Science.