By Li Han

Staff Writer of the Tsinghua News Center

Turing Award Winner, Professor Adi Shamir from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, delivered a speech on April 24 to the Tsinghua Forum, entitled “How Cryptosystems Get Broken.” Professor Qian Yi, Tsinghua’s Chairman of the Academic Affairs Committee and Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, had a discussion with Professor Shamir prior to the speech.

In his talk, Professor Shamir surveyed and demonstrated some of the latest techniques which can be used to break a variety of strong cryptosystems in practice. He answered questions from the students after the speech. Tsinghua Professor Wang Xiaoyun hosted the speech.

Adi Shamir was one of the inventors of the RSA algorithm (along with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman), one of the inventors of the Feige-Fiat-Shamir Identification Scheme (along with Uriel Feige and Amos Fiat), one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer science.

(Photo by Guo Haijun)