Charles Rackoff

Who is Charles Rackoff?

Charles Weill Rackoff is an American cryptologist. Born and raised in New York City, he 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 in France.

Rackoff currently works at the University of Toronto. His research interests are in computational complexity theory. For some time now he has been specializing in cryptography and security protocols. In 1988, he collaborated with Michael Luby in a widely cited analysis of the Feistel cipher construction. Rackoff was awarded the 1993 Gödel Prize for his work on interactive proof systems and for being one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs.

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