Hovav Shacham

Hovav Shacham is a professor of computer security at the University of California, San Diego, whose work spans cryptography and systems security. He completed his doctorate at Stanford University under Dan Boneh with a dissertation on new paradigms in signature schemes, and with Boneh and Ben Lynn he developed a short digital signature scheme built on the Weil pairing that is now widely used. He is best known in security for return oriented programming, a method showing that Turing complete computation can be built by reusing code already present in a program, which turned memory corruption exploits into a general technique. He also took part in a high profile audit of software-controlled cars, studied backscatter X-ray body scanners and chaired the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in 2019 and 2020.