Dan Boneh

Dan Boneh (דן בונה) is an Israeli–American professor in applied cryptography and computer security at Stanford University.

Born in Israel in 1969, Boneh obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University in 1996 under the supervision of Richard J. Lipton.

Boneh is one of the principal contributors to the development of pairing-based cryptography, along with Matt Franklin of the University of California, Davis.

In 1984 Adi Shamir proposed the possibility of identity-based encryption (IBE), which allows people to send encrypted messages to each other by using a public key derived from the recipients identity.

Boneh, with Matt Franklin, proposed one of the first identity-based encryption schemes based on the Weil pairing.

The Boneh-Franklin scheme remains an active area of research.

He joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1997, and became professor of computer science and electrical engineering.

He teaches massive open online courses on the online learning platform Coursera.

In 1999, he was awarded a fellowship from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

In 2002, he co-founded a company called Voltage Security with three of his students.

In 2003, Boneh (with David Brumley) proposed one of the first practical timing attacks on OpenSSL that worked over the Internet.

He then later showed how to extend the attack, "show[ing] that the time web sites take to respond to HTTP requests can leak private information."

Some of Boneh's other results in cryptography and computer security include:

For example, with Eu-Jin Goh and Kobbi Nissim in 2005 Boneh proposed a "partially homomorphic cryptosystem".

Timing attacks are a type of side-channel attack that allows an adversary to attack a security system by studying now long it takes to perform certain calculations.

In 2010 Boneh (with Shweta Agrawal and Xavier Boyen) introduced an IBE scheme from the learning with errors assumption.

A homomorphic encryption algorithm is one where a user can perform computation on encrypted data, without decrypting it.

Boneh's has developed several improvements of homomorphic cryptosystems.

The company was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2015.

In 2016, Boneh was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the theory and practice of cryptography and computer security.

In 2018, Boneh became co-director (with David Mazières) of the newly founded Center for Blockchain Research at Stanford, predicting at the time that "Blockchains will become increasingly critical to doing business globally."

Dr. Boneh is also known for putting his entire introductory cryptography course online for free.

The course is also available via Coursera.

Boneh's primary research focuses is on the area of cryptography where he has worked in numerous areas.