Charles Rackoff

Charles Weill Rackoff (born November 26, 1948, in New York City) is an American cryptologist and professor at the University of Toronto specializing in computational complexity theory, cryptography and security protocols. He earned his PhD in computer science from MIT in 1974 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at INRIA in France. With Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali he helped develop interactive proof systems and formalize zero-knowledge proofs in the 1980s, and with Michael Luby he published a widely cited 1988 analysis showing how to construct pseudorandom permutation generators from pseudorandom function generators. He and four collaborators received the 1993 Godel Prize for the work on interactive proofs, and the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics in 2011.