Amos Fiat (born December 1, 1956) is an Israeli

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

, a professor of computer science at

Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv University (TAU) ( he, אוּנִיבֶרְסִיטַת תֵּל אָבִיב, ''Universitat Tel Aviv'') is a public research university in Tel Aviv, Israel. With over 30,000 students, it is the largest university in the country. Locate ...

. He is known for his work in

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...

online algorithm In computer science, an online algorithm is one that can process its input piece-by-piece in a serial fashion, i.e., in the order that the input is fed to the algorithm, without having the entire input available from the start. In contrast, an o ...

s, and

algorithmic game theory Algorithmic game theory (AGT) is an area in the intersection of game theory and computer science, with the objective of understanding and design of algorithms in strategic environments. Typically, in Algorithmic Game Theory problems, the input t ...

Biography

Fiat earned his Ph.D. in 1987 from the

Weizmann Institute of Science The Weizmann Institute of Science ( he, מכון ויצמן למדע ''Machon Vaitzman LeMada'') is a public research university in Rehovot, Israel, established in 1934, 14 years before the State of Israel. It differs from other Israeli unive ...

under the supervision of

Adi Shamir Adi Shamir ( he, עדי שמיר; born July 6, 1952) is an Israeli cryptographer. He is a co-inventor of the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) algorithm (along with Ron Rivest and Len Adleman), a co-inventor of the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identificat ...

. After postdoctoral studies with

Richard Karp Richard Manning Karp (born January 3, 1935) is an American computer scientist and computational theorist at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most notable for his research in the theory of algorithms, for which he received a Turing A ...

and

Manuel Blum Manuel Blum (born 26 April 1938) is a Venezuelan-American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1995 "In recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computational complexity theory and its application to cryptography and ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, he returned to Israel, taking a faculty position at

Research

Many of Fiat's most highly cited publications concern

, including his work with

digital signature A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature, where the prerequisites are satisfied, gives a recipient very high confidence that the message was created b ...

s (leading to the

Fiat–Shamir heuristic In cryptography, the Fiat–Shamir heuristic is a technique for taking an interactive proof of knowledge and creating a digital signature based on it. This way, some fact (for example, knowledge of a certain secret number) can be publicly proven wi ...

for turning interactive identification protocols into signature schemes) and his work with

David Chaum David Lee Chaum (born 1955) is an American computer scientist, cryptographer, and inventor. He is known as a pioneer in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies, and widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash. His 1982 dissertatio ...

and

Moni Naor Moni Naor ( he, מוני נאור) is an Israeli Israeli may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the State of Israel * Israelis, citizens or permanent residents of the State of Israel * Modern Hebrew, a language * ''Israeli'' (news ...

electronic money Digital currency (digital money, electronic money or electronic currency) is any currency, money, or money-like asset that is primarily managed, stored or exchanged on digital computer systems, especially over the internet. Types of digital cu ...

, used as the basis for the

ecash Ecash was conceived by David Chaum as an anonymous cryptographic electronic money or electronic cash system in 1983. It was realized through his corporation Digicash and used as micropayment system at one US bank from 1995 to 1998. Design Chaum pub ...

system. With Shamir and

Uriel Feige Uriel Feige ( he, אוריאל פייגה) is an Israeli computer scientist who was a doctoral student of Adi Shamir. Life Uriel Feige currently holds the post of Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, the Weizma ...

in 1988, Fiat invented the

Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme In cryptography, the Feige–Fiat–Shamir identification scheme is a type of parallel zero-knowledge proof developed by Uriel Feige, Amos Fiat, and Adi Shamir in 1988. Like all zero-knowledge proofs, it allows one party, the Prover, to prove to ...

, a method for using

public-key cryptography Public-key cryptography, or asymmetric cryptography, is the field of cryptographic systems that use pairs of related keys. Each key pair consists of a public key and a corresponding private key. Key pairs are generated with cryptographic alg ...

to provide

challenge–response authentication In computer security, challenge–response authentication is a family of protocols in which one party presents a question ("challenge") and another party must provide a valid answer ("response") to be authenticated. The simplest example of a cha ...

. In 1994, he was one of the first, with

, to formally study the problem of practical

broadcast encryption Broadcast encryption is the cryptographic problem of delivering encrypted content (e.g. TV programs or data on DVDs) over a broadcast channel in such a way that only qualified users (e.g. subscribers who have paid their fees or DVD players conformin ...

. Along with Benny Chor, Moni Naor and Benny Pinkas, he made a contribution to the development of

Traitor tracing Traitor tracing schemes help trace the source of leaks when secret or proprietary data is sold to many customers. In a traitor tracing scheme, each customer is given a different personal decryption key. (Traitor tracing schemes are often combined ...

, a

copyright infringement Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, s ...

detection system which works by tracing the source of leaked files rather than by direct

copy protection Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy prevention and copy restriction, describes measures to enforce copyright by preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media. Copy protection is most commonly found on ...

. With

Gerhard Woeginger Gerhard J. Woeginger (31 May 1964 – 1 April 2022) was an Austrian mathematician and computer scientist who worked in Germany as a professor at RWTH Aachen University, where he chaired the algorithms and complexity group in the department of co ...

, Fiat organized a series of

Dagstuhl Dagstuhl is a computer science research center in Germany, located in and named after a district of the town of Wadern, Merzig-Wadern, Saarland. Location Following the model of the mathematical center at Oberwolfach, the center is installed in ...

workshops on competitive analysis of

s, and together with Woeginger he edited the book ''Online Algorithms: The State of the Art'' (Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1442, Springer-Verlag, 1998). His research papers include methods for applying competitive analysis to

paging In computer operating systems, memory paging is a memory management scheme by which a computer stores and retrieves data from secondary storage for use in main memory. In this scheme, the operating system retrieves data from secondary storage ...

call control In telephony, call control refers to the software within a telephone switch that supplies its central function. Call control decodes addressing information and routes telephone calls from one end point to another. It also creates the features that c ...

data management Data management comprises all disciplines related to handling data as a valuable resource. Concept The concept of data management arose in the 1980s as technology moved from sequential processing (first punched cards, then magnetic tape) to r ...

, and the assignment of files to servers in

distributed file system A clustered file system is a file system which is shared by being simultaneously mounted on multiple servers. There are several approaches to clustering, most of which do not employ a clustered file system (only direct attached storage for ...

s. Fiat's interest in

game theory Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions among rational agents. Myerson, Roger B. (1991). ''Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict,'' Harvard University Press, p.&nbs1 Chapter-preview links, ppvii–xi It has appli ...

stretches back to his thesis research, which included analysis of the children's game

Battleship A battleship is a large armored warship with a main battery consisting of large caliber guns. It dominated naval warfare in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The term ''battleship'' came into use in the late 1880s to describe a type of ...

. He has taken inspiration from the game

Tetris ''Tetris'' (russian: link=no, Тетрис) is a puzzle video game created by Soviet software engineer Alexey Pajitnov in 1984. It has been published by several companies for multiple platforms, most prominently during a dispute over the approp ...

in developing new

job shop scheduling Job-shop scheduling, the job-shop problem (JSP) or job-shop scheduling problem (JSSP) is an optimization problem in computer science and operations research. It is a variant of optimal job scheduling. In a general job scheduling problem, we are give ...

algorithms, as well as applying competitive analysis to the design of game-theoretic auctions.

Bibliography

* Amos Fiat and Moni Naor, ''Rigorous Time/Space Tradeoffs for Inverting Functions,'' SIAM J. Computing 29(3), 1999, pp. 790–803. * Benny Chor, Amos Fiat, Moni Naor and Benny Pinkas, ''Tracing Traitors'', IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Vol. 46(3), pp. 893–910, 2000. * David Chaum, Amos Fiat and Moni Naor, ''Untraceable Electronic Cash,'' 1990''.'' * Amos Fiat and Moni Naor, ''Broadcast Encryption,'' 1994''.'' * Amos Fiat and Moni Naor, ''Implicit O(1) Probe Search,'' SIAM J. Computing 22: 1–10 (1993).

Honours and awards

*2016 (with

)

Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award The Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award is granted yearly by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to honor "specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing". It wa ...

of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fiat, Amos 1956 births Living people Israeli computer scientists Israeli cryptographers Tel Aviv University faculty Theoretical computer scientists Public-key cryptographers