Biography

Ronald L. Rivest is Institute Professor at MIT, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and a leader of its Cryptography and Information Security research group.

He received a B.A. in Mathematics from Yale University in 1969, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1974. He has research interests in cryptography, computer and network security, and algorithms.

Research and contributions

Professor Rivest is a co-inventor of the RSA public-key cryptosystem, the MD5 message-digest algorithm, and the RC4 stream cipher, among many other contributions to modern cryptography.

Honors

• Member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Member of the National Academy of Engin