Moni Naor

Digital Library

ACM Fellows

Israel - 2020

citation

For contributions to the foundations of cryptography and theoretical computer science

Press Release

ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award

Israel - 2016

citation

For ground-breaking contributions to broadcast encryption and piracy tracking, laying the foundations for modern copyright protection of blue-ray discs and other broadcast media.

Amos Fiat and Moni Naor pioneered the theoretical foundation of cryptographic techniques to protect the copyright of media that are disseminated to many users. The revolutionary concept of Broadcast Encryption enables the transmission of content with strong encryption to a wide and dynamically varying set of recipients, while also being efficient in storage and communication. The important extension of "Traitor Tracing" encodes content in a way that enables the identification and exclusion of users who leak their keys for piracy, while still allowing access by all valid users. These contributions have laid the foundation for standardized techniques to protect the content of Blue-Ray discs as well as various forms of broadcast media over satellite radio and television.

Press Release

2020 ACM Fellows Recognized for Work that Underpins Today’s Computing Innovations

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named 95 members ACM Fellows for wide-ranging and fundamental contributions in areas including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, computer graphics, computational biology, data science, human-computer interaction, software engineering, theoretical computer science, and virtual reality, among other areas. The accomplishments of the 2020 ACM Fellows have driven innovations that ushered in significant improvements across many areas of technology, indus.try, and personal life.

The ACM Fellows program recognizes the top 1% of ACM Members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community. Fellows are nominated by their peers, with nominations reviewed by a distinguished selection committee.

"This year our task in selecting the 2020 Fellows was a little more challenging, as we had a record number of nominations from around the world,” explained ACM President Gabriele Kotsis. “The 2020 ACM Fellows have demonstrated excellence across many disciplines of computing. These men and women have made pivotal contributions to technologies that are transforming whole industries, as well as our personal lives. We fully expect that these new ACM Fellows will continue in the vanguard in their respective fields."

Underscoring ACM’s global reach, the 2020 Fellows represent universities, corporations and research centers in Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Germany, Israel, Japan, The Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The contributions of the 2020 Fellows run the gamut of the computing field―including algorithms, networks, computer architecture, robotics, distributed systems, software development, wireless systems, and web science―to name a few.

Additional information about the 2020 ACM Fellows, as well as previously named ACM Fellows, is available through the ACM Fellows site.

News release

2016 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award

Amos Fiat and Moni Naor were honored for the development of broadcast encryption and traitor tracing systems. Sending broadcast transmissions that only paid subscribers have access to is one of the most important parts of a pay TV system. A traditional challenge of sending encrypted keys to subscribers has been that the pool of subscribers is constantly changing, as are the specific package of channels each customer may be subscribing to at any time. Traditional approaches to Broadcast Encryption would require TV providers to send either very long transmissions or for subscribers to store an inordinate number of cryptographic keys. In 1993, the Israeli team of Amos Fiat and Moni Naor published their landmark paper Broadcast Encryption, which proposed a system of broadcast encryption that was efficient, both in terms of the length of the transmissions the provider sends, and the number of keys a subscriber would need to store. Fiat and Naor’s work is widely regarded as laying the foundation of the broadcast encryption field. Their original ideas are now used by cable television and satellite radio providers to ensure that only paying subscribers can decrypt a broadcast. A form of broadcast encryption is also the standard key management system that is used to protect against the unauthorized copying of Blu-ray discs.

Building on this work, Fiat (Tel Aviv University) and Naor (Weizmann Institute of Science) collaborated with Benny Chor to invent traitor tracing. Traitor tracing enables legal parties who leak their keys to unauthorized parties to be tracked down and identified. Traitor tracing has been an important tool in the war against piracy.

The ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing. This award is accompanied by a prize of $10,000 and is endowed by contributions from the Kanellakis family, with additional financial support provided by ACM's Special Interest Groups on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), Design Automation (SIGDA), Management of Data (SIGMOD), and Programming Languages (SIGPLAN), the ACM SIG Projects Fund, and individual contributions.