Artifact Details

Title

Rivest, Ron oral history

Catalog Number

102717256

Type

Moving image

Description

Ron Rivest is the “R” in RSA, the now-famous public-key cryptosystem for which he and his colleagues Adi Shamir and Len Adelman won the A. M. Turing Award for 2002. In this oral history interview, Ron tells of his early interest in mathematics and computing that eventually took him to Stanford for a PhD under Bob Floyd in the 70’s, an era when many future notables in computing were there. After a post-doc in France, he became a professor at MIT, where he has been since 1974.

Ron talks about the origins of RSA and early, unsuccessful efforts to commercialize it before computing hardware was really up to the computational requirements, then talks more broadly about his interests in computer security, cryptography, and analysis of algorithms. He also discusses his more recent involvement in efforts to create secure voting systems and why, at least for now, verifiable online voting is not possible. He concludes with some thoughts about future directions in computer security and recommendations for those thinking of specializing in computing today, especially regarding the interplay of computing theory and practical systems.

Date

2016-12-06

Participants

Levin, Roy, Interviewer
Rivest, Ron, Interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, CA

Format

MOV

Category

Oral history

Subject

public-key cryptography; RSA; Analysis of algorithms; Computer security; Internet voting

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

X8019.2017
 

Related Records

102717255 Rivest, Ron oral history