Don Coppersmith

Don Coppersmith (* 1950 ) is an American mathematician and cryptologist.

Copper Smith studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor 's degree in mathematics in 1972 and at Harvard University, where in 1975 he received his master's degree and received his doctorate in Shlomo Sternberg 1977 ( deformation of Lie groups and Lie algebras ). As a student he was from 1968 to 1971 for four consecutive times winner in the Putnam competition and thus Putnam Fellow. He conducted research at IBM since 1977 and was involved in the development of the Data Encryption Standard, in particular the cryptanalysis of S- boxes and their improvement against differential cryptanalysis. After this method was published in 1990 by Eli Biham and Adi Shamir, and it became clear that the S-boxes of the DES were optimized, however, revealed Coppersmith that the methods was known to the DES developers already in the first half of the 1970s.

Later he was at the Center for Communication Research (CCR ) of the Institute for Defense Analyses in Princeton. He was involved in the development of the MARS block cipher at IBM, the candidate for the Advanced Encryption Standard was, and where the current ciphers SEAL and Scream. He also dealt with the cryptanalysis of RSA, developed a very fast algorithm for the discrete logarithm ( with applications in cryptography ), and increase the number field sieve in the factorization (also with cryptographic background). He also dealt with the cryptographic protocols Mental Poker by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, Len Adleman.

With Shmuel Winograd, he developed a fast algorithm for matrix multiplication ( Coppersmith - Winograd algorithm).

From 1998 to 2002 he had an online column for recreational mathematics at IBM ( Ponder this).

He is a Fellow of the IEEE (1993) and the International Association for Cryptologic Research ( 2004). He received the IBM Outstanding Innovation Award. In 2002 he was awarded the RSA Security Award in Mathematics.