There couldn’t have been a better time for Israeli professor Shafrira Goldwasser to receive an award for ‘zero-knowledge,’ an ingenious way to encrypt information. With Google having been recently accused of using private data to improve its mapping service, Internet users from all over the world need some peace of mind about letting their private information anywhere near a computer.

Zero-knowledge earned Prof. Goldwasser a trip to Philadelphia to receive the 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science. The professor, who was born in New York to Israeli parents, has made fundamental contributions to the field of study which has become the basis for encoding anything from private messages to credit card numbers on the Internet.

Her first footsteps into the field of cryptography theory were evident when she discovered an affinity to math and physics while attending high school. After graduation, she attended Carnegie Mellon University, which “…already had a strong computer science and applied math department even then,” said Prof. Goldwasser, referring to the 1970s.

Indeed, there had not yet been any concept of personal computing in the 1970s. Prof. Goldwasser admits that some of the women in her computer science classes had never even seen a computer, though she adds that women were more mathematically inclined.

The idea for zero-knowledge came about as an attempt to answer a question posed to by her adviser, who asked what it might take for two people to engage a coin toss over a computer network or phone. Since then, she became obsessed with the finding the answer. And the answer that she came up with was randomized methods of encoding.

Impossible as it may seem, zero-knowledge allows one to process information without seeing it. For example, a merchant can verify whether or not a customer’s credit card information is valid, without having access to the actual credit card number.
Without the technology that stemmed from this theory, the Internet would be a vastly different place. Internet banking, e-commerce, and even email might never exist with any insurance of security.

View a previously written post by Mouli Cohen about Israel.