Eli Biham
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eli Biham is an Israeli cryptographer and cryptanalyst, currently a professor at the Technion Israeli Institute of Technology Computer Science department. Biham received his Ph.D. for inventing (publicly) differential cryptanalysis, while working under Adi Shamir. It had, it turned out, been invented at least twice before. A team at IBM discovered it during their work on DES, and was requested/required to keep their discovery secret by the NSA, who evidently knew about it as well.
In addition to his many contributions to cryptanalysis, Biham has taken part in the design of several new cryptographic primitives:
- Serpent (with Ross Anderson and Lars Knudsen), a block cipher which was one of the final five contenders to become the Advanced Encryption Standard
- Tiger (with Ross Anderson), a hash function fast on 64-bit machines, and
- Py (with Jennifer Seberry), a fast stream cipher which has some cryptanalytic claims against it.