Tal Rabin was born in Massachusetts and grew up in Jerusalem, Israel. As a child, she enjoyed solving riddles and playing strategic games. Her father, Michael Rabin, is a celebrated computer scientist who is responsible for many breakthroughs in the fields of computability and cryptography. She and her father have co-authored a paper together. She is the mother of two daughters.
Career
In 1986, she received her BSc from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She continued her studies for her MSc and PhD degrees in the Hebrew University under the supervision of prof. Michael Ben Or. Between the years 1994–1996 she was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT. She later joined the cryptography group at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and became head of the group in 1997. Rabin's research focuses on cryptography and network security, specifically the design of efficient and secure encryptionalgorithms. In addition, she studies secure distributed protocols and the theoretical foundations of cryptography, as well as number theory and the theory of algorithms and distributed systems. She has co-authored over 100 papers. She has also registered five patents in the US. Her research focuses on making communications over the internet more secure. Her most cited works in this field focus on the design of digital signature schemes, which are widely used, among other applications, in protocols for secure web communication. Another focus is on a different scheme of encrypted communications called secret sharing. A sizable part of her work on these subjects is done in collaboration with Rosario Gennaro and Hugo Krawczyk. Rabin has been on the committees of many leading cryptography conferences, including TCC, Crypto, PKC and Eurocrypt. She was a council member of the Computing Community Consortium, a member of the executive committee of SIGACT, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Cryptology. Rabin is a founder and organizer of the Women in Theory Workshop, a event for graduate students in theoretical computer science. She is also involved in activities to make the field of encryption more accessible to the general public. In 2011 she took part in the World Science Festival, a popular science event held in New York City. In 2014, she took part in a similar event, the WNYC Science Fair.
