Eli Biham

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Eli Biham (Hebrew: אלי ביהם‎) is an Israeli cryptographer and cryptanalyst, currently a professor at the Technion Israeli Institute of Technology Computer Science department. Biham received his Ph.D. for inventing (publicly) differential cryptanalysis, while working under Adi Shamir. It had, it turned out, been invented at least twice before. A team at IBM discovered it during their work on DES, and was requested/required to keep their discovery secret by the NSA, who evidently knew about it as well.

Among his many contributions to cryptanalysis one can count:

differential cryptanalysis - publicly invented during his Ph.D. studies under Adi Shamir
Attacking all triple modes of operation.
impossible differential cryptanalysis - joint work with Adi Shamir and Alex Biryukov
Breaking (together with Lars Knudsen) the ANSI X9.52 CBCM mode (few days before the final standardization)
Breaking the GSM security mechanisms (with Elad Barkan and Nathan Keller)
Co-invention of related-key attacks.
Differential Fault Analysis - joint work with Adi Shamir

In addition to his many contributions to cryptanalysis, Biham has taken part in the design of several new cryptographic primitives:

Serpent (with Ross Anderson and Lars Knudsen), a block cipher which was one of the final five contenders to become the Advanced Encryption Standard
Tiger (with Ross Anderson), a hash function fast on 64-bit machines, and
Py (with Jennifer Seberry), one of a family of fast stream ciphers (see article for more detail on their cryptanalytic status.