Charles Weill Rackoff is an American cryptologist. Born and raised in New York City, Rackoff attended MIT as both an undergraduate and graduate student, and earned a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1974. He spent a year as a postdoctoral scholar at INRIA

Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique

The National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control is a French national research institution focusing on computer science, control theory and applied mathematics.It was created in 1967 at Rocquencourt near Paris, part of Plan Calcul...

 in France.

He currently works at the University of Toronto

University of Toronto

The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

. His research interests are in computational complexity theory

Computational complexity theory

Computational complexity theory is a branch of the theory of computation in theoretical computer science and mathematics that focuses on classifying computational problems according to their inherent difficulty, and relating those classes to each other...

. For some time now he has been specializing in cryptography

Cryptography

Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...

 and security protocols. In 1988, he collaborated with Michael Luby

Michael Luby

Michael George Luby is a mathematician and computer scientist, VP Technology at Qualcomm and former co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Digital Fountain. In coding theory he is known for leading the invention of the Tornado codes and the LT codes...

 in a widely-cited analysis of the Feistel cipher

Feistel cipher

In cryptography, a Feistel cipher is a symmetric structure used in the construction of block ciphers, named after the German-born physicist and cryptographer Horst Feistel who did pioneering research while working for IBM ; it is also commonly known as a Feistel network. A large proportion of block...

 construction (one important result shown there is the construction of a strongly pseudo random permutation generator from a pseudo random function generator). Rackoff was awarded the 1993 Gödel Prize

Gödel Prize

The Gödel Prize is a prize for outstanding papers in theoretical computer science, named after Kurt Gödel and awarded jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science and the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory .The...

 for his work on interactive proof systems and zero-knowledge proofs.

Rackoff's comments on the 2000 memorial for the victims of the Montreal Massacre were reported in Canadian media.

Selected publications

• S. Goldwasser
  Shafi Goldwasser
  Shafrira Goldwasser is the RSA Professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and a professor of mathematical sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.-Biography:...
  
  , S. Micali
  Silvio Micali
  Silvio Micali is an Italian-born computer scientist at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a professor of computer science in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science since 1983. His research centers on the theory of cryptography and information...
  
   and C. Rackoff, "The knowledge complexity of interactive proof systems", SIAM Journal on Computing
  SIAM Journal on Computing
  The SIAM Journal on Computing is a scientific journal focusing on the mathematical and formal aspects of computer science. It is published by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics . As of September 2008, Éva Tardos serves as editor-in-chief.-External links:** on DBLP...
  
  , 18, 1989, pp. 186–208.
• C. Rackoff and D. Simon, "Non-interactive zero-knowledge proof of knowledge and the chosen cipertext attack", in Proceedings of Crypto 91, pp. 433–444.
• C. Rackoff and D. Simon, "Cryptographic defense against traffic analysis", in Proceedings of the 25th ACM
  Association for Computing Machinery
  The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
  
  Symposium on Theory of Computing, May 1993, pp. 672–681.