Craig Gentry

Craig Gentry joins the Algorand Foundation from the Cryptography Research Group at IBM Research. While a PhD student at Stanford and a summer intern at IBM, he built the first fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme, a breakthrough for which he won the ACM Doctoral Dissertation and ACM Grace Murray Hopper Awards. Continuing at IBM, he developed next-generation FHE schemes, including “BGV” and “GSW”, and worked with Shai Halevi (author of HElib) and others to make FHE more practical. He has also contributed work on zero-knowledge proofs (“Pinocchio”), signatures (BGLS aggregate signatures), and cryptographic program obfuscation (helping to build the first plausibly secure construction). For his work on FHE and obfuscation, he won the MacArthur “Genius” Award in 2014.