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I took the question to crypto slack, because real cryptographers are a lot smarter than me, and, submitted for your approval, and because their contributions are very much worth reflecting on: some amazing women cryptographers:
The obvious place to start would be Shafi Goldwasser, a giant in the field, Turing award winner, co-inventor of zero-knowledge proofs. #womencryptographers
If you follow crypto nerds on Twitter you’re also surely thinking about Tanja Lange, crypto chair at Eindhoven and bad-ass elliptic curve and PQ researcher. We got tips for cryptopals from Tanja. #womencryptographers
Wang Xiaoyun broke MD5 and SHA1. #womencryptographers
an aside: cryptography has more women practitioners than many (most?) CS fields; it’s one of the first things you’ll notice at an academic crypto conference. but the field is still male-dominated, which is a travesty.
but since crypto is _LESS_ male-dominated than “ordinary” CS, and yet _FAR MORE_ demanding than the sort of “plug this database column into this form field” work CS grads end up doing, women excelling in crypto is a valuable corrective to bias against women in tech.
Tal Rabin heads IBM’s crypto research group and advanced the art of signature algorithms and, in particular, multiparty secret sharing. #womencryptographers
because i am dumb i am going to give a lot of people short shrift in my little capsule twitter summaries, and i would be grateful for anyone who trues any of them up!
Lenore Blum, “one of the Blums” from the Blum Blum Shub CSRNG. Founded Women@SCS at CMU, where she was a distinguished professor: women.cs.cmu.edu Hell yes, Lenore Blum. #womencryptographers
Here’s a name even I’m smart enough to rattle off the top of my head: Nadia Henninger, among the best-known practical offensive cryptography researchers — Dual EC, DROWN, cold-boot attacks, Coppersmithing smartcards. #womencryptographers
if you’re an offensive security person and you know who Mark Dowd is, you should know who Nadia Henninger is, just as way of having pride in your own damn profession.
Helena Handschuh is a technical director at Cryptography Research and Rambus, the industry’s foremost modernizers of side-channel attacks. She’s published attacks on RC5, SEAL, eSTREAM ciphers, RC6, and a variety of tamper-proof devices. #womencryptographers
Emilia Käsper was a DROWN-attack researcher, co-designed Certificate Transparency, and published attacks on GCM. #womencryptographers
Kaisa Nyburg invented Nyburg S-boxes, a refinement of the nonlinear core of modern block ciphers, which features in Rijndael, perhaps better known to you as AES. #womencryptographers
Joanne Woodage at Royal Halloway published on backdoors in CSPRNGs, which is how the cool SIGINT agencies actually backdoor cryptosystems. #womencryptographers
could i go on and on and on here? yes i could! i have (checks notes) more than 50 more names in this list, but i’ll stop shortly because the pretense that i am tuned in enough to know all these people myself is already bugging me
But I will point out what was pointed out to me an hour ago, which is that the first president of the IACR was Dorothy Denning. #womencryptographers
And that Edna Grossman co-designed DES, which you may have heard of. #womencryptographers
I will conclude by repeating an observation I already made:
Most CS grads go on to a fruitful career in wiring databases to HTML tags. And yet the field has _less than 20%_ women participation.
But women have spent the last 40+ years killing it in cryptography.
Most CS grads go on to a fruitful career in wiring databases to HTML tags. And yet the field has _less than 20%_ women participation.
But women have spent the last 40+ years killing it in cryptography.
Not enough women! The gender disparity in mathematics and cryptography, while better than that in CS, is still a travesty!
But anyone who wants to come at me with a just-so story about how women are biologically predisposed against excellence in computer science can fucking shove it.
Fun additional fact: @kenjilopezalt’s better half, Adriana Lopez-Alt, is an accomplished cryptographer at (ISTR) Google; works on FHE, differential privacy and (swoon) Macaroons, the coolest token format nobody uses. #womencryptographers
