Moti Yung

Moti Yung is a Security and Privacy Research Scientist with Google and an Adjunct Research Faculty at the Computer Science Dep., Columbia University. He got his PhD from Columbia University in 1988. Previously, he was with IBM Research, Certco/ Bankers Trust, RSA Laboratories (EMC), and Snap. Yung is a fellow of the IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). In 2018 he received the IEEE Computer Society W.W. McDowell award for innovative contributions to computer and network security, predicting, both attack scenarios and design needs in this important evolving area. In 2010 he gave the IACR Distinguished Lecture. He is also the recipient of the 2014 ACM’s SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation award, the 2014 ESORICS (European Symposium on Research in Computer Security) Outstanding Research award, an IBM Outstanding Innovation award, a Google OC award, and a Google founders’ award. Yung’s main professional interests are in Security, Privacy, and Cryptography. His contributions to research and development treat science and technology holistically: from the theoretical mathematical foundations, via conceptual mechanisms which typify computer science, to participation in the design and development of industrial products. His published work (articles, patents, a book, and edited books) includes collaborations with more than 300 highly appreciated co-authors. Yung’s work has been predicting future needs of secure systems, and analyzing coming threats. These led to basic theoretical and applied notions, like: ransomware attacks, cryptosystems subversion, concurrent sessions in authentication protocols, strong (chosen ciphertext) secure encryption, and digital signatures from simplified cryptography. His industrial work gave rise to new diversified mechanisms, some of which are in extensive use. These include: public-key based second factor (resulting in U2F); new factors for user identification; distributed signing methods; secure large scale distributed computation protocol for privacy preserving data analytics; and various very large scale encryption systems, such as Google encryption within the Advertisement Exchange system and Snap's secure end-to-end encryption.