No visa, so the S in RSA misses RSAC 2018 crypto panel

Turing Award winner Adi Shamir, the renowned cryptographer who provides the initial S in the well-known RSA cryptography algorithm, is missing from the annual RSA Security conference as he apparently could not obtain a visa to enter the United States.

Shamir was a prominent absentee on the conference’s Cryptography Panel which attracts some of the top global cryptography talent.

For example in 2016, the panel consisted of Ron Rivest, MIT Institute Professor, MIT; Shamir; Whitfield Diffie, cryptographer and security expert, Cryptomathic; Moxie Marlinspike, chief technology officer, Whisper Systems; and Martin Hellman, professor emeritus of electrical engineering, Stanford University.

That year, the panel had an absorbing discussion about Apple’s decision to refuse to co-operate with the FBI over a case where the law enforcement agency demanded that the company create a new version of its operating system. The FBI wanted to use the new OS to access data on a iPhone belonging to one of the attackers in a 2015 terrorism case.

A conference spokesman told iTWire: “We missed having Adi’s insight on the Cryptographer’s Panel this year. In his video shared at the beginning of the panel session, Adi said that he was unable to get a visa this year. Beyond that, we do not have details to share.”

RSA is one of the first public-key cryptosystems. The acronym is derived from the surnames of the three cryptographers who were behind it: Rivest, Shamir and Leonard Adelman, all of whom were at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the time. The algorithm was first described in 1978.

Shamir, who is also co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme, one of the inventors of differential cryptanalysis and one who has made numerous contributions to the fields of cryptography and computer science, is now a professor in the Computer Science Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.