Ran Canetti

Ran Canetti
Born	1962 Tel Aviv, Israel
Occupation(s)	Computer scientist, cryptographer
Years active	1990s–present
Known for	Co-inventor of HMAC, Universally Composable Security framework
Notable work	HMAC, Universally Composable Security framework

Ran Canetti () holds a professorship in Computer Science at Boston University and directs both the Check Point Institute for Information Security and the Center for Reliable Information Systems and Cyber Security. He is an associate editor for the journals Journal of Cryptology and Information and Computation. His scholarly work centers on cryptography and information security, with a particular emphasis on the creation, evaluation, and implementation of cryptographic protocols.

Biography

Born in 1962 in Tel Aviv, Israel, Canetti obtained his BA degrees in computer science (1989) and physics (1990), followed by an M.Sc. in computer science (1991), all from the Technion in Haifa. He earned his PhD in 1995 at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, mentored by Prof. Oded Goldreich. In 1996, he conducted postdoctoral research at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science under Prof. Shafi Goldwasser, before joining IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center as a research staff member, where he remained until 2008.

Canetti is widely acknowledged for his impactful contributions to both theoretical foundations and practical aspects of cryptography. Notably, he co-invented the Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC) in 1996 with Mihir Bellare and Hugo Krawczyk. He also developed the Universally Composable Security framework, which facilitates modular and robust security assessments of cryptographic protocols.

Among his honors are the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics (2018), designation as a Fellow of the Association of Cryptologic Research, IBM Research Outstanding Innovation Award (2006), IBM Corporate Award (2005), IBM Research Division Award (1999), two IBM Best Paper Awards, and the Kennedy Thesis Award from The Weizmann Institute.

Current roles

Since July 2011, Canetti has served as a professor in Boston University’s Department of Computer Science. He has also been directing research at the Center for Reliable Information Systems and Cyber Security (RISCS) since September 2011. Additionally, he heads the Check Point Institute of Information Security at Tel Aviv University, holds editorial positions with Journal of Cryptography and Information and Computation, and acts as an advisor to Identiq, a peer-to-peer identity verification platform.

He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ronitt Rubinfeld, and their two daughters.

Patents

Among Canetti's patents are:

• Techniques for Mitigating Dictionary Attacks on Password-Based Local Storage (2006)
• Non-Transferable Anonymous Credentials, U.S. Patent No. 7,222,362 (2007)
• Method for Concealing a Key from Mobile Eavesdroppers, US Patent No. 5,412,723 (1995)
• Secure Communication and Computation Methods within an Unsecured Environment, US Patent No. 5,469,507 (1995)

Standards

• “Group Key Management Architecture,” IETF RFC 4046, 2005
• “TESLA: Multicast Source Authentication Transform,” IETF RFC 4082, 2005
• “HMAC: Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication,” IETF RFC 2104, 1997; also adopted as ANSI standard X9.71 (2000) and NIST Federal Information Processing Standard No. 198 (2002)

Books

Ran Canetti has written numerous books and contributed chapters to prominent publications, such as:

• Security and Composition of Cryptographic Protocols
• A chapter featured in Secure Multiparty Computation, edited by Manoj Prabhakaran and Amit Sahai
• Cryptology and Information Security Series, published by IOS Press in 2013
• A contribution to the Journal of Cryptology Special Issue on Byzantine Agreement, Volume 18, Issue 3, 2005
• The Chapter on the Decisional Diffie-Hellman Assumption in the Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security, Springer-Verlag, 2005

Publications

• Bellare, Mihir; Canetti, Ran; Krawczyk, Hugo. "Keying Hash Functions for Message Authentication," 1996
• R. Canetti. "Universally Composable Security: A New Paradigm for Cryptographic Protocols," Proceedings of the 42nd FOCS, 2001
• N. Bitansky, R. Canetti, O. Paneth, A. Rosen. "On the Existence of Extractable One-Way Functions," STOC, 2014
• Ran Canetti et al., "Fiat-Shamir and Correlation Intractability from Strong KDM-Secure Encryption," EUROCRYPT(1): 91-122, 2018
• Ran Canetti et al., "Task-structured Probabilistic I/O Automata," Journal of Computer and System Sciences 94: 63-97, 2018

Canetti has played a pivotal role in organizing leading workshops within the field, including Crypto in the Clouds at MIT (2009), CPIIS TAU/IDC Workshop on Electronic Voting (2009), and Theoretical Foundations of Practical Information Security (2008). He served as Program Committee Chair for the Theory of Cryptography Conference in 2008 and co-chaired the Internet Engineering Task Force Multicast Security Working Group from 2000 to 2008.

Comprehensive List of Ran Canetti’s Publications (1990–2018)

Areas of research

His scholarly pursuits center on cryptography and information security, with a strong emphasis on the creation, evaluation, and practical implementation of cryptographic protocols.

Awards

• RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics, awarded in 2018
• IBM Research Outstanding Innovation Award in 2006 for seminal contributions to modern cryptography
• IBM Corporate Award received in 2005 acknowledging the significance of the HMAC algorithm
• IBM Research Best Paper Awards earned in both 2001 and 2004
• IBM Research Outstanding Innovation Award granted in 2004
• IBM Research Division Award awarded in 1999 for work related to the IPSEC standard
• IBM Innovation Award received in 1997 for designing the HMAC message authentication mechanism
• The Kennedy Thesis Award from The Weizmann Institute in 1996
• Rothschild Post-Doctoral Fellowship during 1995-96
• Gutwirth Special Excellence Fellowship at Technion in 1992

Public appearances

Ran Canetti has been invited to deliver keynote addresses at numerous prestigious global conferences, including:

• Composable Formal Security Analysis: Juggling Soundness, Simplicity and Efficiency, ICALP 2008, Reykjavik
• Obtaining Universally Composable Security: Towards the Bare Bones of Trust, AsiaCrypt 2007, Kuching
• How to Obtain and Assert Composable Security, Usenix Security Symposium 2007, Boston
• Universally Composable Security with Global Set-Up, IPAM Program at UCLA, 2006
• Security and Composition of Cryptographic Protocols: A Tutorial, IPAM Program at UCLA, 2006
• The HMAC Construction: A Decade Later, MIT CIS Seminar, 2005