| Levchin Prize | |
| Awarded For: | “major innovations in cryptography that have had a significant impact on the practice of cryptography and its use in real-world systems” |
| Sponsor: | Max Levchin |
| Presenter: | Real World Crypto steering committee |
| Reward: | $10,000 |
| Year: | 2016-01-06 |
The Levchin Prize for real-world cryptography is a prize given to people or organizations who are recognized for contributions to cryptography that have a significant impact on its practical use. The recipients are selected by the steering committee of the Real World Crypto (RWC) academic conference run by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) and announced at the RWC conference.[1]
The award was established in 2015 by Max Levchin, a software engineer and businessman who co-founded the financial technology company PayPal, and first awarded in January 2016.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
Two awards are presented every year, each on its own topic. While there is no formal rule, every year so far as of 2024, one of the two awards has recognized one or more individuals for theoretical advancements to cryptographic methods with a practical impact, while the other has recognized one or more individual or an organization for either the construction of practical systems or practical advancements in cryptanalysis.
The following table lists the recipients of the Levchin Prize.[6]
| Year | Recipient(s) | Contribution | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | “For groundbreaking practice-oriented research that has had exceptional impact on real-world cryptography.” This includes work on authenticated encryption and format-preserving encryption. | ||
| 2016 | The miTLS team: Cedric Fournet, Karthikeyan Bhargavan, Alfredo Pironti, and Markulf Kohlweiss | “For the analysis of TLS and the development of the miTLS project.” | |
| 2017 | “For the development of AES and SHA3.” | ||
| 2017 | Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin | “For the development and wide deployment of the Signal protocol.” | |
| 2018 | Hugo Krawczyk | “For the development of real-world cryptographic systems with strong security guarantees and proofs.” This includes work on IPsec, IKE, SSL/TLS, HMAC and HKDF. | |
| 2018 | The OpenSSL team | “For dramatic improvements to the code quality of OpenSSL.” | |
| 2019 | “For outstanding contributions to the design and analysis of real-world cryptosystems, including the development of the random oracle model, modes of operation, HMAC, and models for key exchange.” | ||
| 2019 | Eric Rescorla | “For sustained contributions to the standardization of security protocols, and most recently the development and standardization of TLS 1.3.” Other work includes earlier versions of TLS and DTLS, WebRTC, ACME and QUIC, as well as co-founding Let's Encrypt. | |
| 2020 | “For fundamental contributions to the development of public key cryptography, hash algorithms, Merkle trees, and digital signatures.” | ||
| 2020 | Xiaoyun Wang and Marc Stevens | “For groundbreaking work on the security of collision resistant hash functions.” | |
| 2021 | “For the invention of elliptic curve cryptography.” | ||
| 2021 | “For continued development of the Tor system and the underlying cryptography.” | ||
| 2022 | “For foundational innovations in cryptanalysis.” | ||
| 2022 | “For fundamental improvements to the certificate ecosystem that provide free certificates for all.” | ||
| 2023 | “For co-designing the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).” | ||
| 2023 | “For pioneering work on side channel analysis.” | ||
| 2024 | “For the development of efficient Anonymous Credentials” | ||
| 2024 | “For creating and deploying Certificate Transparency at scale” |