Ran Canetti
Ran Canetti comes to us from Tel Aviv University, where he served as an Associate Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Checkpoint Institute for Information Security. Ran Canetti is a leading expert in cryptographic protocols and computer security. He played an important role in the development of algorithms and Internet standards for such tasks as key agreement and message authentication. His HMAC authentication algorithm (co-developed with Bellare and Krawczyk) is built into every modern operating system from mainframes to handhelds, and is used billions of times a day.
On the theoretical side, Rand’s seminal work on protocol composition (which has been cited thousands of times) has improved our understanding of how secure components can be put together to produce a secure result. His current research agenda includes the problem of program obfuscation, which could be used for a host of applications including secure cloud computing and privacy-preserving data mining.
Ran received his PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science. Before joining the faculty of Tel Aviv University, he was a researcher at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center and a visiting scientist at MIT. In addition to his faculty appointment in computer science, he will also serve as the Associate Director for Research in the BU Center for Reliable Information Systems & Cyber Security (RISCS).