Interactive Bennett Custom Awards Presented to 2018 Levchin Prize Recipients
The Real-World Cryptology Conference presented unique, interactive custom awards created by Bennett Awards to two 2018 recipients of the Levchin Prize: IBM Fellow and cryptographer Hugo Krawczyk and The OpenSSL team, which provides a full-featured toolkit for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocols. The Levchin Prize was established in 2015 by internet entrepreneur, Max Levchin, the CEO of fintech company Affirm and a co-founder and former CTO of PayPal. The Levchin Prize honors significant contributions to real-world cryptography and celebrates recent advances that have had a major impact on the practice of cryptography and its use in real-world systems. Up to two awards will be given every year and each carries a cash prize of $10,000. Award recipients are announced at the Real World Cryptography Conference.
Hugo Krawczyk is an IBM Fellow and a Distinguished Research Staff Member with the Cryptography Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center whose areas of interest span theoretical and applied aspects of cryptography. He has contributed to the cryptographic design of numerous Internet standards, particularly IPsec, IKE, and SSL/TLS, and is a co-inventor of the HMAC message authentication algorithm. His most recent work in this area includes designs for TLS 1.3, the next generation TLS, and HKDF, an emerging standard for key derivation adopted by TLS 1.3, Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and more.
The OpenSSL Team provides an open-source, robust, commercial-grade, and full-featured toolkit for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocols. The team includes the following individuals: Matt Caswell, Mark Cox, Paul Dale, Viktor Dukhovni, Bernd Edlinger, Steve Henson, Tim Hudson, Lutz Jänicke, Ben Kaduk, Emilia Käsper, Ben Laurie, Richard Levitte, Steve Marquess, Bodo Möller, Andy Polyakov, Kurt Roeckx, Rich Salz and Geoff Thorpe.
These award recipients were selected by the Real-World Cryptography conference steering committee, which includes professors from Stanford University, University of Edinburgh, Microsoft Research, Royal Holloway University of London, Cornell Tech, University of Florida, and University of Bristol.
In 2017, Bennett Awards worked with the Real-World Cryptology Conference to create a unique, interactive custom award design that honors the practice of cryptography. The award design is a “puzzle” that challenges recipients to solve it. The award design is in the shape of a cylinder, with rotating circular disks that, properly rotated and positioned, spell out “LEVCHIN PRIZE”. Once the disks are in the correct position, the award also reveals a secret inner chamber in the spindle of the cylinder.
These award recipients were honored with these unique, custom recognition awards at the 2018 Real-World Cryptology Conference, held in Zurich, Switzerland.