Professors Leonid Reyzin and Adam Smith Win 2019 IACR Test-of-Time-Award
Boston University Department of Computer Science Professors Leonid Reyzin and Adam Smith, and their colleague Yevgeniy Dodis (NYU), have won the 2019 IACR Test-of-Time Award for their 2004 paper Fuzzy Extractors: How to Generate Strong Keys from Biometrics and Other Noisy Data.
In this paper, the researchers introduced “formal definitions and efficient secure techniques for turning biometric information into keys usable for any cryptographic application, and reliably and securely authenticating biometric data.” They also provided “nearly optimal constructions of both primitives for various measures of ‘closeness’ of input data, such as Hamming distance, edit distance, and set difference.”
This IACR Test-of-Time Award is given to influential papers that appeared in each of the three main IACR conferences — Asiacrypt, Crypto, and Eurocrypt — fifteen years previously. An award will be given at conference Y in year X to honor a paper published in conference Y in year X-15 which has had a lasting impact on the field.
Congratulations, Leo and Adam!