Mordechai M. "Moti" Yung is a cryptographer and computer scientist known for his work on cryptovirology and kleptography.
Career Yung earned his PhD from Columbia University in 1988 under the supervision of Zvi Galil. In the past, he worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, CertCo, RSA Laboratories, and Google.Moti Yung page: Google Research In 2016, Yung moved from Google to Snap Inc. Yung is currently a research scientist at Google.
Yung is an adjunct senior research faculty member at Columbia University, and has co-advised PhD students including Gödel Prize winner Matthew K. Franklin, Jonathan Katz, and Aggelos Kiayias.
Yung is a former trustee of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). In November 2025, he resigned from the position after the IACR's annual leadership election was nullified and rerun when he was unable to provide the required cryptographic key.
Research Yung research covers primarily the area of cryptography and its applications to information security and data privacy. He has worked on defining and implementing malicious (offensive) cryptography: cryptovirology and kleptography, and on various other foundational and applied fields of cryptographic research, including: user and entity electronic authentication,Ray Bird, Inder S. Gopal, Amir Herzberg, Philippe A. Janson, Shay Kutten, Refik Molva, Moti Yung: Systematic Design of Two-Party Authentication Protocols. CRYPTO 1991: 44-61 John G. Brainard, Ari Juels, Ronald L. Rivest, Michael Szydlo, Moti Yung: Fourth-factor authentication: somebody you know. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2006 information-theoretic security,Carlo Blundo, Alfredo De Santis, Amir Herzberg, Shay Kutten, Ugo Vaccaro, Moti Yung: Perfectly-Secure Key Distribution for Dynamic Conferences. CRYPTO 1992: 471-486 Danny Dolev, Cynthia Dwork, Orli Waarts, Moti Yung: Perfectly Secure Message Transmission. J. ACM 40(1): 17-47 (1993) secure multi-party computation,R. Cramer, Introduction to Secure Computation http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.130.9163&rep=rep1&type=pdfZvi Galil, Stuart Haber, Moti Yung: Cryptographic Computation: Secure Faut-Tolerant Protocols and the Public-Key Model. CRYPTO 1987: 135-155 Matthew K. Franklin, Moti Yung: Communication Complexity of Secure Computation (Extended Abstract). STOC 1992: 699-710 VentureBeat: Google’s Private Join and Compute gives companies data insights while preserving privacy threshold cryptosystems,Alfredo De Santis, Yvo Desmedt, Yair Frankel, Moti Yung: How to share a function securely. STOC 1994: 522-533 NISTIR 8214: Threshold Schemes for Cryptographic Primitives -- Challenges and Opportunities in Standardization and Validation of Threshold Cryptography, by Luís T. A. N. Brandão, Nicky Mouha, and Apostol Vassilev and zero-knowledge proofs,Russell Impagliazzo, Moti Yung: Direct Minimum-Knowledge Computations. CRYPTO 1987: 40-51 Gilles Brassard, Claude Crépeau, Moti Yung: Constant-Round Perfect Zero-Knowledge Computationally Convincing Protocols. Theor. Comput. Sci. 84(1): 23-52 (1991)Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, Moti Yung, Yunlei Zhao: Concurrent Knowledge Extraction in Public-Key Models. J. Cryptology 29(1): 156-219 (2016)
Cryptovirology In 1996, Adam L. Young and Yung coined the term cryptovirology to denote the use of cryptography as an attack weapon via computer viruses and other malware in contrast to its traditional protective role. In particular, they described the first instances of ransomware using public-key cryptography.Skeptical Experts and Smart Attackers. Feb. 2 2013 http://privacy-pc.com/articles/moti-yung-and-adam-young-on-kleptography-and-cryptovirology-5-skeptical-experts-and-smart-attackers.htmlRansomware: The future of extortion By Jibu Elias September 04, 2017 https://www.techradar.com/news/ransomware-the-future-of-extortion
Kleptography In 1996, Adam L. Young and Yung introduced the notion of kleptographyInfosecurity Magazine: The Dark Side of Cryptography: Kleptography in Black-Box Implementations https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/magazine-features/the-dark-side-of-cryptography-kleptography-in/ to show how cryptography could be used to attack host cryptosystems where the malicious resulting system with the embedded cryptologic tool in it resists reverse-engineering and cannot be detected by interacting with the host cryptosystem, as an argument against cryptographic systems and devices given by an external body as "black boxes" as was the Clipper chip and the Capstone program.How to Design — And Defend Against — The Perfect Security Backdoor, Bruce Schneier, Wired Magazine, 10/16/2013
After the 2013 Snowden affair, the NIST was believed to have mounted the first kleptographic attack against the American Federal Information Processing Standard detailing the Dual EC DRBG, essentially exploiting the repeated discrete logarithm based "kleptogram" introduced by Young and Yung.
Awards In 2010 he was the annual Distinguished Lecturer of the International Association for Cryptologic Research at Eurocrypt.IACR Distinguished Lectures, retrieved 2012-03-11 In 2013 he became a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.ACM Names Fellows for Computing Advances that Are Transforming Science and Society , Association for Computing Machinery, accessed 2013-12-10 In 2014 he received the ESORICS (European Symposium on Research in Computer Security) Outstanding Research Award.http://homepages.laas.fr/esorics/ Esorics Awards In 2014 he became a fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research.IACR Moti Yung, IACR Fellow, 2014 In 2014 he received the ACM's SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award.http://www.sigsac.org/award/sigsac-awards.html SIGSAC Awards In 2015 he became an IEEE fellow. IEEE fellows 2015 In 2017 Yung became a fellow of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. EATCS fellows In 2018 Yung received the W. Wallace McDowell Award by the IEEE Computer Society. In 2020 Yung received the Public Key Cryptography Conference's Test of Time Award for his 1998 paperYiannis Tsiounis, Moti Yung: On the Security of ElGamal Based Encryption. Public Key Cryptography 1998 117-134. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1431, Springer, 1998 |title= on the security of ElGamal Encryption. See.https://www.iacr.org/meetings/pkc/test_of_time_award/ PKC Test-of-Time Award In 2020 Yung received the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy's Test of Time Award for his 1996 paper on Cryptovirology. IEEE 2020 Symp. on Security and Privacy Best Paper Awards. In 2021 Yung received Computer Pioneer Award honoring the Women of the ENIAC Moti Yung Award Recipient In 2023 Yung was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences In 2024 Yung received the IACR Test of Time Award for his 2009 paperFrançois-Xavier Standaert, Tal Malkin, Moti Yung: A Unified Framework for the Analysis of Side-Channel Key Recovery Attacks. EUROCRYPT 2009: 443-461 Seehttps://iacr.org/testoftime/ IACR Test of Time Awards In 2025 Yung received the 2026 IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award In 2026 Yung was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering
Selected publications 1989: Universal one-way hash functions and their cryptographic applications (with M. Naor; ACM’s STOC). 1990: Public-key cryptosystems provably secure against chosen ciphertext attacks (with M. Naor; ACM’s STOC). 1991: How to withstand mobile virus attack (with Ostrovsky; ACM’s PODC). 1992: Multi-Receiver/Multi-Sender Network Security: Efficient Authenticated Multicast/Feedback (with Desmedt and Frankel; IEEE's INFOCOM 1992) 1999: Non-Interactive CryptoComputing For NC1 (with Sander and Young; IEEE's FOCS 1999). 2000: Unforgeable Encryption and Chosen Ciphertext Secure Modes of Operation (with Katz; Fast Software Encryption (FSE)). 2004: Malicious Cryptography: Exposing Cryptovirology (with A. Young; Wiley 2004: A book). 2009: Efficient and secure authenticated key exchange using weak passwords (with Katz and Ostrovsky; JACM 57(1)). 2009: A unified framework for the analysis of side-channel key recovery attacks (with Standaert and Malkin; Eurocrypt). 2017: Generic Semantic Security against a Kleptographic Adversary (with A. Russell, Q. Tang, and H-S Zhou; ACM's CCS)
References
External links Home page at Columbia University DBLP Publication Page Google Scholar Page Research Gate Labs website