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Affirm CEO Max Levchin Awards First Annual Prize for Advancements in Real-World CryptographyREAL WORLD CRYPTOGRAPHY CONFERENCE 2016 - Internet entrepreneur Max Levchin today awarded the first annual Levchin Prizes for Real-World Cryptography to Phillip Rogaway, a Computer Science professor at the University of California, Davis, and to the international miTLS team led by Karthikeyan Bhargavan, a researcher at INRIA Paris-Rocquencourt, a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics. Rogaway received his $10,000 prize for groundbreaking practice-oriented research that has had an exceptional impact on real-world cryptography. The miTLS team will share its $10,000 award for their analysis of Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol and the development of the miTLS project. In addition to Bhargavan, the miTLS team includes Cedric Fournet, a principal researcher for Microsoft (News - Alert) Research Ltd in Cambridge, U.K.; Markulf Kohlweiss, also a researcher at Microsoft Research; and Alfredo Pironti, a cyber security specialist. The first award recipients were announced today at the Real-World Cryptography conference at Stanford University. The annual conference brings together cryptography researchers with developers implementing cryptography on the Internet, the cloud and embedded devices to strengthen the dialogue between the two communities. The Real-World Cryptography conference steering committee chose the prize winners. The steering committee includes professors from Cornel Tech, Royal Holloway University of London, Stanford University, University of Athens, University of Bristol, University of Connecticut, and the University of Florida. "Advances in Internet security and the cryptography behind them are crucial to the future of cyber security and keeping the Internet safe for everyone," said Levchin, PayPal (News - Alert) co-founder and former CTO, and now CEO of the financial technology company Affirm. "Cryptography has never been more important in everyone's daily lives and yet most people do not even realize it." Rogaway is considered a giant in the field of symmetric encryption. He was given the Levchin Prize for his work on authenticated encryption and format preserving encryption. In addition to developing its verified implementation of the TLS protocol the miTLS team also uncovered numerous mistakes in the design of TLS and mistakes in many other implementations. Their work is partially the reason for the upcoming updates to TLS called TLS 1.3. TLS is possibly the most used secure communications protocol, with a long history of flaws and fixes, ranging from its protocol logic and cryptographic design to the Internet standard and its diverse implementations. About Levchin Prizes for Real-World Cryptography and Max Levchin: Max Levchin created the Real-World Cryptography awards to celebrate recent advances that have had a major impact on the practice of cryptography and its use in real-world systems. Levchin considers the prize a seed investment and hopes to attract interest from other supporters to elevate the monetary portion of the award in 2017 and beyond. Additional details on the award can be found here: http://levchinprize.com Max Levchin is the founder and CEO of Affirm, a financial services technology company and chairman of Glow, a women's reproductive health company. Both companies were created and launched from his San Francisco based innovation and investment lab, HVF (Hard, Valuable, Fun). Max was one of the original cofounders of PayPal where he served as the CTO until its acquisition by Ebay in 2002 and is primarily known for his contributions to PayPal's anti-fraud efforts as the co-creator of the Gausebeck-Levchin test, one of the first commercial implementations of a CAPTCHA. In 2002, he was named to the Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world as well as Innovator of the Year. In 2004, he helped start Yelp, where he was Chairman of the Board from 2004 until 2015. He has served on several boards such as Yahoo! and Evernote (News - Alert) and was recently appointed to the Consumer Advisory Board of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Max is a serial entrepreneur, computer scientist, philanthropist and active investor in early stage startups.
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