RSA Conference 2024 Announces Annual Awards for Lifetime Achievement and Excellence in the Field of Mathematics

SAN FRANCISCO, May 7, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- RSA Conference™, the world's leading cybersecurity conferences and expositions, today announced the recipient of the RSA Conference 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award, Michael Brown, Rear Admiral, US Navy (Ret.), as well as the recipients of the Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics, Craig Gentry, Chief Technology Officer at TripleBlind, and Oded Regev, Silver Professor in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. For the third consecutive year, the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) co-sponsored the Mathematics Award with RSA Conference.

"It's an honor to recognize the lengthy career and distinguished service of Michael Brown along with the pioneering efforts of Craig Gentry and Oded Regev, two distinguished individuals in the cryptography and encryption space," said Linda Gray Martin, Senior Vice President, RSA Conference. "All three of this year's award recipients have demonstrated deep dedication to their fields and will have a long-lasting impact on the cybersecurity industry."

Lifetime Achievement Award
The Lifetime Achievement Award honors outstanding leaders who have made significant contributions to the advancement of the cybersecurity industry over their lifetime. Past recipients represent several of the most influential minds in the field whose work continues to have a lasting impact.

The RSA Conference 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award is awarded to Michael Brown, Rear Admiral, US Navy (Ret.)

Brown joined the Navy in 1976 as a Midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, and over the next three plus decades, went on to hold significant leadership positions within the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, specializing in intelligence and information operations, and playing a key role in expanding the Navy's operational role in cyberspace.

His last position on active duty was as the Director of Cybersecurity Coordination for DHS where he was responsible for increasing inter-agency collaboration in strategic planning for the nation's cybersecurity, mutual support for capabilities development, and synchronization of current mission activities for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

After leaving the Navy, Brown joined RSA Security as the President of its Federal Division and partnered with RSA Conference, leading collaboration with governments around the world. Today, he's the Founder and President of Spinnaker Security, a consulting business focused on understanding, identifying and mitigating business risks associated with cybersecurity.

Brown received the DHS Distinguished Service Medal, one of the Department's highest honors, along with numerous military commendations during his career in the US Navy.

Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics, Co-Sponsored by IACR
First presented in 1998, the RSA Conference Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics  acknowledges the outstanding contributions of individuals and/or organizations whose work in cryptography and mathematics helps to advance the cybersecurity industry.  Award recipients are determined by an esteemed judging committee which seeks to recognize innovation and ongoing contributions to the industry. Dozens of nominated individuals from affiliated organizations, universities or research labs compete each year for this award.

The recipients of the RSA Conference 2024 Excellence in the Field of Mathematics Award are:

Craig Gentry
In 2009, as part of his PhD thesis, Gentry proposed the first Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), basing its security on a hardness problem in certain ideal lattices and the hardness of the sparse subset sum problem. Designing an FHE encryption scheme which allows general computations over the encrypted inputs to produce an encrypted output (i.e. computing any general efficient computation over encrypted data producing homomorphically the encrypted output while never decrypting the ciphertexts) was proposed in 1978 by Rivest, Adleman, and Dertouzos, as a way to compute privately, and had produced only partial results for over 30 years until Gentry's solution and approach. Gentry, among his other results in lattice-based cryptography, also further participated in designing advanced generations of FHE with improved efficiency.

Oded Regev
Regev, among his various results in lattice-based cryptography, invented `Learning with Errors' (LWE) in 2005: an underlying problem used as a hardness assumption to create public-key cryptosystems. Since then, the encryption method has been further developed and heavily employed by others. One of the developments co-authored by Regev is the LWE over Rings (RLWE) problem and encryption method. In recent years, due to the advancement of quantum computing, lattice-based cryptography has gained momentum as providing alternative schemes that are not known to be broken by polynomial time quantum computing algorithms. In contrast, traditional schemes based on Factoring and Discrete Log are susceptible to such attacks, as was shown by Peter Shor.

"The IACR is thrilled to be co-sponsoring the Excellence in the Field of Mathematics Award again this year," said Michel Abdalla, President, IACR. "The math award winners this year made significant contributions to the field of lattice-based cryptography, including a foundational `Learning with Errors'-based cryptosystem (Regev) and the first 'Fully Homomorphic Encryption' system (Gentry). Their outstanding efforts in the field of mathematics and cryptography have been critical to the progress of cybersecurity."

For more information regarding RSA Conference 2024, taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week from May 6-9, visit our website at www.rsaconference.com/usa.

About RSA Conference
RSA Conference™ is the premier series of global events and year-round learning for the cybersecurity community. RSAC is where the security industry converges to discuss current and future concerns and have access to the experts, unbiased content, and ideas that help enable individuals and companies advance their cybersecurity posture and build stronger and smarter teams. Both in-person and online, RSAC brings the cybersecurity industry together and empowers the collective "we" to stand against cyberthreats around the world. RSAC is the ultimate marketplace for the latest technologies and hands-on educational opportunities that help industry professionals discover how to make their companies more secure while showcasing the most enterprising, influential, and thought-provoking thinkers and leaders in cybersecurity today. For the most up-to-date news pertaining to the cybersecurity industry visit www.rsaconference.com. Where the world talks security.

About the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) is a non-profit organization devoted to supporting the promotion of the science of cryptology. Cryptology is the science of the making and breaking of encryption algorithms, but in the modern world it encompasses so much more. You use cryptology all the time, when banking, when using a mobile phone, when opening your car door. You are even using it now when you are reading this web page.

IACR organize a series of conferences and workshops. IACR publishes the Journal of Cryptology, in addition to the proceedings of its conference and workshops. IACR also maintains the Cryptology ePrint Archive, an online repository of cryptologic research papers aimed at providing rapid dissemination of results. For more information, please visit www.iacr.org.

SOURCE RSA Conference