Eli Biham

Prof. Eli Biham received his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science at the Tel Aviv University (cum laude), 1982, and his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute, 1991. His Ph.D. thesis developed Differential Cryptanalysis, the first cryptanalysis method that could break the Data Encryption standard (DES), and the first general cryptanalysis method that was applicable to a large family of block ciphers. Since 1991 he is a faculty member at the Technion’s faculty of Computer Science. He (together with his students and colleagues) developed various methods for analysis of various kinds of ciphers. The most known of them are DES, and the cipher of the GSM cellular phone system (A5) – which proved that it is easy to listen in to any GSM (voice or data) conversation, and even to fake such calls as if originated from somebody else’s phone. He also developed new ciphers, the most known of them is Serpent, which was a leading candidate to become the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) – the successor of DES.