Shafrira Goldwasser (Hebrew: שפרירה גולדווסר; born 1959) is a computer scientist from Israel and the United States. She is the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also teaches at the Weizmann Institute of Science and was the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. She helped start Duality Technologies and works as its chief scientist. 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 later returned to the United States and earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics and science in 1979 from Carnegie Mellon University. She completed her master's degree in 1981 and her PhD in 1984 from the University of California, Berkeley, under the guidance of Manuel Blum.

While studying at Berkeley, Goldwasser focused on cryptography and algorithmic number theory. She and Blum developed the Blum-Goldwasser cryptosystem. Along with Silvio Micali, another student at Berkeley, she helped create the idea of probabilistic encryption. This method allows one message to be encrypted into many different ciphertexts, making it harder for attackers to break the encryption when they try to guess the original message.

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 position 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 Duality Technologies to commercialize fully homomorphic encryption. She also serves as a scientific advisor for technology startups, such as QED-it, which focuses on Zero Knowledge Blockchain, and Algorand, a blockchain created by her collaborator Silvio Micali.

On January 1, 2018, she became the director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, a role she held until August 2024.

Goldwasser’s research areas include 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 introduced zero-knowledge proofs, a key tool in cryptography that allows proving the truth of a statement without revealing extra information. They studied interactive proofs, where a proof is created through a series of questions about a problem. In the late 1980s, Micali’s group and the team of László Babai and Shlomo Moran separately published work on interactive proofs. All of them later shared a Gödel Prize for their contributions.

In complexity theory, Goldwasser has studied the difficulty of approximation problems and their links to interactive proofs and the PCP theorem. She has also created protocols for sending computations to untrusted servers. With Joe Kilian, she developed a primality test using elliptic curves. Goldwasser is also a lead researcher on Project CETI, an interdisciplinary effort to translate sperm whale communication.

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 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 work 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 plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. In 2004, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2005, she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to cryptography, number theory, and complexity theory, and their applications to privacy and security. 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 received 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 at 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, she 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 on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2020. She was awarded the 2021 L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science Award in Computer Science.