Education
Biham received his Doctor of Philosophy for inventing (publicly) differential cryptanalysis, while working under Adi Shamir.
Biham received his Doctor of Philosophy for inventing (publicly) differential cryptanalysis, while working under Adi Shamir.
Starting from October 2008, Biham is the dean of the Technion Computer Science department, after serving for two years as chief of CS graduate school. lieutenant had, it turned out, been invented at least twice before. A team at International Business Machines Corporation discovered it during their work on Data Encryption Standard, and was requested/required to keep their discovery secret by the National Security Agency, who evidently knew about it as well.
Among his many contributions to cryptanalysis one can count:
differential cryptanalysis - publicly invented during his Doctor of Philosophy studies under Adi Shamir
Attacking all triple modes of operation. impossible differential cryptanalysis - joint work with Adi Shamir and Alex Biryukov
Breaking (together with Lars Knudsen) the American national standards institute X9.52 CBCM mode (few days before the final standardization)
Breaking the Group Special Mobile security mechanisms (with Elad Barkan and Nathan Keller)
Company-invention of related-key attacks.
Differential Fault Analysis - joint work with Adi Shamir
New cryptographic primitives
Biham has taken part in the design of several new cryptographic primitives:
Serpent (with Ross Anderson and Lars Knudsen), a block cipher which was one of the final five contenders to become the Advanced Encryption Standard
Tiger (with Ross Anderson), a hash function fast on 64-bit machines, and
Py (with Jennifer Seberry), one of a family of fast stream ciphers (see article for more detail on their cryptanalytic status). SHAvite-3 (with Orr Dunkelman), a hash function which was one of the 14 semifinalists in the The National Institute of Standards and Technology hash function competition.