Moti Yung


Mordechai M. "Moti" Yung is a cryptographer and computer scientist known for his work on cryptovirology and kleptography.

Career

Yung earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1988 under the supervision of Zvi Galil. In the past, he worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, CertCo, RSA Laboratories, and Google. In 2016, Yung moved from Google to Snap Inc. Yung is currently a research scientist at Google.
Yung was an adjunct senior research faculty member and has co-advised PhD students including Gödel Prize winner Matthew K. Franklin and Jonathan Katz.

Research

Yung has worked in cryptovirology, kleptography, information-theoretic security, secure multi-party computation, and zero-knowledge proofs,

Cryptovirology

In 1996, Adam L. Young and Yung coined the term cryptovirology to denote the use of cryptography as an attack weapon via computer viruses and other malware in contrast to its traditional protective role. In particular, they described the first instances of ransomware using public-key cryptography.

Kleptography

In 1996, Adam L. Young and Yung introduced the notion of kleptography to show how cryptography could be used to attack host cryptosystems where the malicious resulting system with the embedded cryptologic tool in it resists reverse-engineering and cannot be detected by interacting with the host cryptosystem, as an argument against cryptographic systems and devices given by an external body as "black boxes" as was the Clipper chip and the Capstone program.
After the 2013 Snowden affair, the NIST was believed to have mounted the first kleptographic attack against the American Federal Information Processing Standard detailing the Dual EC DRBG, essentially exploiting the repeated discrete logarithm based "kleptogram" introduced by Young and Yung.

Awards