Moni Naor

Moni Naor (מוני נאור) is an Israeli computer scientist, currently a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Naor received his Ph.D. in 1989 at the University of California, Berkeley. His advisor was Manuel Blum.

He works in various fields of computer science, mainly the foundations of cryptography. He is notable for initiating research on public key systems secure against chosen ciphertext attack and creating non-malleable cryptography, visual cryptography (with Adi Shamir), and suggesting various methods for verifying that users of a computer system are human (leading to the notion of CAPTCHA). His research on Small-bias sample space, give a general framework for combining small k-wise independent spaces with small $$\epsilon$$-biased spaces to obtain $$\delta$$-almost k-wise independent spaces of small size. In 1994 he was the first, with Amos Fiat, to formally study the problem of practical broadcast encryption. Along with Benny Chor, Amos Fiat, and Benny Pinkas, he made a contribution to the development of Traitor tracing, a copyright infringement detection system which works by tracing the source of leaked files rather than by direct copy protection.

Honors and awards

 * 2008: Named an IACR fellow
 * 2014: The Gödel Prize (with co-authors)
 * 2016: The Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award of the Association for Computing Machinery (with Amos Fiat)
 * 2022: The 30-year Test-of-Time STOC Award for his 1991 STOC paper “Non-Malleable Cryptography” (with Cynthia Dwork and Danny Dolev)
 * 2022: RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics (with Cynthia Dwork)
 * 2024: Rothschild Prize in Computer Science for 2024