Silvio Micali was born on October 13, 1954. He is an Italian computer scientist and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the founder of Algorand, a proof-of-stake blockchain cryptocurrency protocol. His research at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory focuses on cryptography and information security.
In 2012, he and Shafi Goldwasser were given the Turing Award for their work on cryptography.
Personal life
Micali received a degree in mathematics from La Sapienza University of Rome in 1978 and completed a PhD in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1982, under the guidance of Manuel Blum. Since 1983, he has worked as a professor in MIT's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. He has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Toronto, and Tsinghua University. His areas of study include cryptography, zero knowledge, pseudorandom generation, secure protocols, and mechanism design.
Career
Micali is best known for his important early work on public-key encryption systems, pseudorandom functions, digital signatures, oblivious transfer, secure multiparty computation, and for being one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs.
While a graduate student, Micali worked with another student, Shafi Goldwasser, to create the idea of probabilistic encryption. In this method, a message can be turned into different encrypted messages each time, making it hard for someone to guess the original message even if they see multiple encrypted versions. At the same time, Micali and his advisor, Manuel Blum, created a pseudorandom generator called 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 answer questions to build a proof. Later, in 1985, Micali, Goldwasser, and Rackoff introduced a special type of interactive proof called zero-knowledge proofs. These proofs allow someone to show that a statement is true without giving away any extra information.
Some of Micali’s former doctoral students include Mihir Bellare, Bonnie Berger, Shai Halevi, Rafail Ostrovsky, and Phillip Rogaway.
In 2001, Micali co-founded CoreStreet Ltd, a software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company used Micali’s patents to check the status of digital certificates, which are important for large digital and physical identity projects. Micali was the Chief Scientist at CoreStreet. The company was bought by ActivIdentity in 2009.
In the early 2000s, Micali also started Peppercoin, a micropayments system. Peppercoin was acquired in 2007. In 2017, he founded Algorand.
Micali won the Gödel Prize in 1993 with Goldwasser, Rackoff, Babai, and Moran for their work on interactive proofs. He received the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics in 2004. In 2007, he became 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.
Micali received the Turing Award in 2012 with Shafi Goldwasser for their work in cryptography. The Turing Award is often called the Nobel Prize of computing.
In 2015, the University of Salerno honored Micali with an honorary degree in Computer Science. He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2017.