Ronald Rivest

She's the co-inventor of ring signatures and has also shown the insecurity of the Fiat Shamir heuristic.

Along with Ron Rivest and Odi Shamir, she published the classic paper of How to Leak a Secret, which led to the invention of ring signatures.

So what is a typical day involved for you?

Okay, actually, my days are really nice.

And once I had an idea, he was like, okay, I want to hear it.

And once the idea was coming, then I just naturally became a student.

And then you obviously worked with Ron Rivest too around that, how to share a secret paper around round signatures.

It's funny that you say that he gave you the proceedings because I think Whitfield Diffie, he went to see Marty Hellman and Marty Hellman said, here's five problems that you could work on.

So that's the first time I got into elections.

And then the next time was as an undergraduate at MIT, where I got to do some work with Professor Ron Rivest and got really interested in the security aspect of elections.

Um...

When you study cryptography, folks will tell you that it's not just about the math.

And the obvious application is that whole idea of being able to make probabilistic payments on Lightning, because this is an old problem that if you want to make payments that are so small that they're not sort of economic economic to be broadcast on chain? Could you still do that within an off-chain protocol? And it might be a good time to mention that it goes back a lot further than that.

I'm guilty, as well as I think they were in that discussion, I'm also guilty of not referring to the original history here, which is quite interesting, that way back 30 years ago, 1997, Ron Rivest published a paper basically discussing the same thing.

And what he was thinking was this, that if we have these new digital cash payment systems, they're cool and everything, but there will be some flaw, some minimum cost to do such a transaction.

You know, it might be 30 cents or a dollar or something, right? And so he was thinking, well, how could we have payments that were really small, micropayments between customers and merchants, and yet sort of deal with the fact that if the customer already wants to pay 10 cents, well, that's just not economically viable.

Many years ago, people used to h- to be able to access their email in the early, probably '90s, used to have these keys, and they randomly generated numbers and used to say the actual name of the company, which was RSA.

One of my colleagues, Ron Rivest, was the R in the RSA.

And, and that is still the foundation of our infrastructure today.

The reason you can use your smartphone to do online banking, the reason that we can use secure WhatsApp is fundamentally built on the same architecture that's 50 more years old, and one of them being RSA.

Oh, that is a really good question.

Because in my life, I've been lucky enough to have dinner with a lot of the cryptographic greats, Bruce Schneier and Ron Rivest, to name a few.

But I think if I were to go back, I would now actually, right now, I would like to go have dinner with Shore.

Because I want to understand what his thinking was and where he could have gone with that algorithm.