Michael Rabin Has Died

Thank you Michael Rabin for your excellent work. Rest in Peace.

Rabin Fingerprinting is one of my favorites of his contributions. It's a "rolling hash" that allows you to quickly compute a 32-bit (or larger) hash at *every* byte offset of a file. It is used most notably to do file block matching/deduplication when those matching blocks can be at any offset. It's tragically underappreciated.

I've been meaning to write up a tutorial as part of my Galois Field series. Someday..

Thank you again!

Michael Rabin, 1976 ACM Turing Award Recipient

https://youtu.be/L3FZzGU3n14

I took his Introduction to Cryptography class when he was a visiting professor at Columbia. Absolute master of an old-school chalkboard lecturer. They don't make them like that any more.

First sentence starts with horrible antisemitism. Can someone fix it? (on my phone with kids so not in a position to)

Amazing man, with many important contributions over a very long career. The Rabin Cryptosystem (like RSA, but with public exponent 2) is notable for two reasons. First, unlike RSA, it is provably as hard as "factorization" (as he would call it), and second, unlike RSA, it wasn't protected by patent.

Doctoral advisor - Alonzo Church

Michael O. Rabin had important contributions in many domains, but from a practical point of view the most important are his contributions to cryptography.

After Ralph Merkle, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, Michael O. Rabin is the most important of the creators of public-key cryptography.

The RSA team (Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman) is better known than Michael O. Rabin, but that is entirely due to marketing and advertising, because they founded a successful business.

In reality the RSA algorithm is superfluous and suboptimal. If the RSA team had never discovered this algorithm, that would have had a null impact on the practice of cryptography. Public-key cryptography would have been developed equally well, because the algorithms discovered by Merkle, Diffie, Hellman and Rabin are necessary and sufficient.

On the other hand, while without the publications of RSA, cryptography would have evolved pretty much in the same way, without the publications of Michael O. Rabin from the late seventies the development of public-key cryptography would have been delayed by some years, until someone else would have made the same discoveries.

Together with Ralph Merkle, Michael O. Rabin was the one who discovered the need for secure cryptographic hash functions, i.e. one-way hash functions, which are now critical for many applications, including digital signatures. Thus Rabin is the one who has shown how the previously proposed methods of digital signing must be used in practice. For example, the original signing algorithm proposed by RSA could trivially be broken and it became secure only in the modified form described by Rabin, i.e. with the use of a one-way hash function.

Originally, Merkle defined 2 conditions for one-way hash functions, of resistance to first preimage attacks and second preimage attacks, while Rabin defined 1 condition, of resistance to collision attacks. Soon after that it was realized that all 3 conditions are mandatory, so the 2 definitions, of Merkle and of Rabin, have been merged into the modern definition of such hash functions.

Unfortunately, both Merkle and Rabin have overlooked a 4th condition, of resistance to length extension attacks. This should have always been included in the definition of secure hash functions.

Because this 4th condition was omitted, the US Secure Hash Algorithm Standards defined algorithms that lack this property, which has forced many applications to use workarounds, like the HMAC algorithm, which for many years have wasted time and energy wherever encrypted communications were used, until more efficient authentication methods have been standardized, which do not use one-way hash functions, for instance GCM, which is today the most frequently used authentication algorithm on the Internet.

It's hard to imagine how a single person managed to accomplish so much. RIP to the great soul :|

@dang this deserves a black ribbon

May his memory be a blessing.

I loved implementing the Rabin-Karp algoritm, such a fun and celever solution.

"As a young boy, he was very interested in mathematics and his father sent him to the best high school in Haifa, where he studied under mathematician Elisha Netanyahu, who was then a high school teacher."

Interesting. Some people are lucky enough to find their vocation quite early in life.