Dr. Victor Saul Miller

Born in Brooklyn, New York, US, he is an American mathematician at the Center for Communications Research (CCR) of the Institute for Defense Analyses in Princeton, New Jersey, US. He received his A.B. degree in Mathematics from Columbia University in 1968, and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard University in 1975. He was an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department of the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1973 to 1978. In 1978 he joined the IBM 801 project in the Computer Science Department of the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and moved to the Mathematics Department in 1984. Since 1993 he has been at CCR. His main areas of interest are in Computational Number Theory, Combinatorics, Data Compression and Cryptography. He is one of the co-inventors of Elliptic Curve Cryptography, (ECC); an approach to public-key cryptography based on the algebraic structure of elliptic curves over finite fields. One of the main benefits in comparison with non-ECC cryptography (with plain Galois fields as a basis) is the same level of security provided by keys of smaller size. Elliptic curves are applicable for encryption, digital signatures, pseudo-random generators and other tasks. They are also used in several integer factorization algorithms that have applications in cryptography, such as Lenstra elliptic curve factorization. The use of elliptic curves in cryptography was suggested independently by both he and Neal Koblitz in 1985. He is also one of the co-inventors, with Mark Wegman, of the LZW data compression algorithm, and various extensions, one of which is used in the V.42bis international modem standard. He received an IEEE Millennium medal for this invention. Various patents have been issued in the United States and other countries for LZW and similar algorithms. He is also the inventor of Miller's Algorithm which is of fundamental use in pairing-based cryptography. He is also one of the co-inventors of the Lagarias-Miller-Odlyzko prime counting algorithm. He is the recipient of the Excellence in the Field of Mathematics RSA Conference 2009 Award. In addition, he is a Fellow of the IEEE, and of the International Association for Cryptologic Research.