Moti Yung

Mordechai M. "Moti" Yung
Mordechai M. "Moti" Yung
Alma mater	Columbia University
Occupation(s)	Cryptographer, computer scientist, research scientist, adjunct senior research faculty member
Years active	1988–present
Employer(s)	Google, Snap Inc., IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, CertCo, RSA Laboratories, Columbia University (adjunct)
Known for	Founding cryptovirology and kleptography; contributions to cryptography and information security

Mordechai M. "Moti" Yung is a distinguished cryptographer and computer scientist known for his pioneering work in the fields of cryptovirology and kleptography.

Career

Yung completed his doctoral studies at Columbia University in 1988 under the supervision of Zvi Galil. His professional journey includes roles at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, CertCo, RSA Laboratories, and Google. In 2016, he moved from Google to Snap Inc. but has since returned to Google, where he currently holds a position as a research scientist.

Additionally, Yung serves as an adjunct senior research faculty member at Columbia University. He has co-mentored several prominent PhD candidates, among them Gödel Prize laureate Matthew K. Franklin, Jonathan Katz, and Aggelos Kiayias.

Research

Yung’s scholarly activities center on cryptography and its practical applications in enhancing information security and safeguarding data privacy. He is credited with founding the concept of offensive cryptography, including the subfields of cryptovirology and kleptography. His contributions span both theoretical and applied cryptographic disciplines such as user and entity electronic authentication, information-theoretic security, secure multi-party computation, threshold cryptosystems, and zero-knowledge proofs. These efforts underpin essential security frameworks and privacy technologies extensively deployed across commercial and data protection environments.

Cryptovirology

In 1996, together with Adam L. Young, Yung introduced the term cryptovirology to characterize the use of cryptographic techniques as offensive instruments through means like computer viruses and other forms of malicious software, marking a significant shift from their conventional defensive purpose. They developed the earliest instances of public-key based ransomware.

Kleptography

That same year, Young and Yung formulated the concept of kleptography, revealing how cryptographic methods could be manipulated to compromise host cryptosystems by embedding covert cryptographic backdoors that are resistant to detection or analysis. This notion raised critical concerns about the reliability of externally supplied "black box" cryptographic devices such as the Clipper chip and the Capstone initiative.

After revelations from the 2013 Snowden affair, suspicions arose regarding a kleptographic backdoor implemented by the NIST within the American Federal Information Processing Standard through the controversial Dual EC DRBG algorithm—an application of the discrete logarithm-based "kleptogram" framework originally proposed by Young and Yung.

Awards

Distinguished Lecturer for the International Association for Cryptologic Research at Eurocrypt in 2010.
Elected fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2013.
Awarded the ESORICS Outstanding Research Award and named fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research in 2014.
Recipient of the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award also in 2014.
Honored as an IEEE fellow in 2015.
Became a fellow of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science in 2017.
Received the prestigious W. Wallace McDowell Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 2018.
In 2020, honored with two Test of Time Awards: one from the Public Key Cryptography Conference recognizing his 1998 work on ElGamal encryption, and another from the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy for his seminal 1996 paper on Cryptovirology.
Awarded the Women of the ENIAC Computer Pioneer Award in 2021.
Inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.
Received the IACR Test of Time Award in 2024 for his influential 2009 publication on side-channel key recovery attacks.

Selected publications

1989: Universal one-way hash functions and their cryptographic applications (co-authored with M. Naor; presented at ACM STOC).
1990: Public-key cryptosystems provably secure against chosen ciphertext attacks (joint work with M. Naor; ACM STOC).
1991: How to withstand mobile virus attack (collaborated with Ostrovsky; ACM PODC).
1992: Multi-Receiver/Multi-Sender Network Security: Efficient Authenticated Multicast/Feedback (with Desmedt and Frankel; IEEE INFOCOM).
1999: Non-Interactive CryptoComputing For NC1 (in partnership with Sander and Young; IEEE FOCS).
2000: Unforgeable Encryption and Chosen Ciphertext Secure Modes of Operation (co-written with Katz; Fast Software Encryption).
2004: Malicious Cryptography: Exposing Cryptovirology (collaboration with A. Young; Wiley).
2009: Efficient and secure authenticated key exchange using weak passwords (with Katz and Ostrovsky; JACM).
2009: A unified framework for the analysis of side-channel key recovery attacks (jointly authored with Standaert and Malkin; Eurocrypt).
2017: Generic Semantic Security against a Kleptographic Adversary (co-authored alongside A. Russell, Q. Tang, and H-S Zhou; ACM CCS).

External links