Professor Rivest is an MIT Institute Professor. His home department is the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a member of the lab's Theory of Computation Group and is a leader of its Cryptography and Information Security Group.
Professor Rivest has current research interests in cryptography, computer and network security, voting systems, algorithms, and exposure notification. In the past he has also worked extensively in the area of machine learning.
He is a co-author (with Cormen, Leiserson, and Stein) of the well-known text, Introduction to Algorithms (now out in its Fourth Edition), published by MIT Press. Over 1,000,000 copies of this text have been sold. It has been translated into 14 languages.
He is perhaps best known as a co-inventor (with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman) of the RSA public-key cryptosystem. He is a founder of RSA, Verisign, and Peppercoin. He has extensive experience in cryptographic design and cryptanalysis, and has published numerous papers in these areas. He has served as a Director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, the organizing body for the Eurocrypt and Crypto conferences, and as a Director of the International Financial Cryptography Association. He is a founder of RSA, and is a co-founder of Verisign and of Peppercoin.
Professor Rivest is a member of the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project. He served 2004--2009 on the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), advisory to the Election Assistance Commission, developing recommendations for voting system certification standards; he was chair of the TGDC's Computer Security and Transparency Subcommittee. He also serves on the Board of Advisors of the Verified Voting Foundation. He has worked with the Scantegrity team developing and testing voting systems that are verifiable ``end-to-end.'' He has worked extensively on statistical post-election tabulation audits, of both the ``risk-limiting audit'' and ``Bayesian'' flavors.
Professor Rivest is a member of the Center for Science of Information.
Professor Rivest grew up in Niskayuna, New York, a suburb of Schenectady, where he attended public schools, graduating from Niskayuna High School in 1965.
Professor Rivest received a B.A. in Mathematics from Yale University in 1969.
He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1974; his research supervisor was Professor Robert Floyd. While there, he also worked closely with Professor Donald Knuth, David Klarner, and Vašek Chvátal
He was a post-doc at INRIA in Rocquencourt, France for the academic year 1973-74.